Peripheral Memories: Public and Private Forms of Experiencing and Narrating the Past [1. Aufl.] 9783839421161

Table of contents :
Contents
Peripheral Memories – Introduction
The Functions of Familial Memory and Processes of Identity
“Totally Average Families”? Thoughts on the Emotional Dimension in the Intergenerational Transmission of Perspectives on National Socialism
The Aftermath of Violence. The Post-Coup Second Generation in Chile
Familial Discussions in the Context of Memory Research on the Second World War. Expectations and Disappointments
The Family as a Social Frame of Memory. The Example of Luxembourgian Farmer Families
Private, Semi-Public, Published. Rural Autobiographies within the Family and Beyond
Curating People? Museum Mediated Memories and the Politics of Representation
Remembering the Home. The Intricate Effects of Narrative Inheritance and Absent Memory on the Biographical Construction of Orphanhood
Public Discourse and Private Memory Processes in Luxembourgian Steel Worker Families
Questioning the Cultural Memory of the 1960s. Communist Narratives in Contemporary British History
Remembering Socialism, Living Post-Socialism. Gender, Generation and Ethnicity
“Actually we are Deeply Rooted in Austria”. National Identity Constructions and Historical Perceptions of Young People with Migration Backgrounds in Austria
Narrated (Hi)Stories in an Intercultural Context. How Young People in Germany and Poland Deal with Tensions Between Communicative and Cultural Memory
Contributors

Citation preview

Elisabeth Boesen, Fabienne Lentz, Michel Margue, Denis Scuto, Renée Wagener (eds.) Peripheral Memories

Histoire | Volume 36

Acknowledgement: The editors wish to thank the Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg and the University of Luxembourg for their financial support to this publication.

Elisabeth Boesen, Fabienne Lentz, Michel Margue, Denis Scuto, Renée Wagener (eds.)

Peripheral Memories Public and Private Forms of Experiencing and Narrating the Past

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2012 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover concept: Elisabeth Boesen, Reneé Wagener Cover illustration: Culture and Sport Glasgow (Museums) Typeset and Proofread by Elisabeth Boesen, Jessica Ring and Katharina Voss Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar ISBN 978-3-8376-2116-7

Contents

Peripheral Memories – Introduction

Elisabeth Boesen ᨸ7 The Functions of Familial Memory and Processes of Identity

Anne Muxel ᨸ21 “Totally Average Families”? Thoughts on the Emotional Dimension in the Intergenerational Transmission of Perspectives on National Socialism

Jan Lohl ᨸ33 The Aftermath of Violence The Post-Coup Second Generation in Chile

Daniela Jara ᨸ51 Familial Discussions in the Context of Memory Research on the Second World War Expectations and Disappointments

Renée Wagener ᨸ69 The Family as a Social Frame of Memory The Example of Luxembourgian Farmer Families

Elisabeth Boesen ᨸ95 Private, Semi-Public, Published Rural Autobiographies within the Family and Beyond

Rita Garstenauer ᨸ121 Curating People? Museum Mediated Memories and the Politics of Representation

Elizabeth Carnegie ᨸ143 Remembering the Home The Intricate Effects of Narrative Inheritance and Absent Memory on the Biographical Construction of Orphanhood

Delyth Edwards ᨸ161

Public Discourse and Private Memory Processes in Luxembourgian Steel Worker Families

Denis Scuto ᨸ183 Questioning the Cultural Memory of the 1960s Communist Narratives in Contemporary British History

Joseph Maslen ᨸ203 Remembering Socialism, Living Post-Socialism Gender, Generation and Ethnicity

Daniela Koleva ᨸ219 “Actually we are Deeply Rooted in Austria” National Identity Constructions and Historical Perceptions of Young People with Migration Backgrounds in Austria

Alena Pfoser ᨸ239 Narrated (Hi)Stories in an Intercultural Context How Young People in Germany and Poland Deal with Tensions Between Communicative and Cultural Memory

Jeanette Hoffmann ᨸ259 Contributors ᨸ

Peripheral Memories – Introduction E LISABETH B OESEN

The recent development of memory research that, similar to earlier developments in other research fields, brought about a near dominance of the subject in the social sciences and the humanities, has now reached a stage in which the symptoms of a crisis are becoming more than obvious. While the phrase “memory boom”, which has been popular for quite a while, already implies a certain criticism, we are currently encountering unmistakable characterisations such as the “hypertrophy” of memory (Huyssen 2003: 3), an “avalanche” of memory discourses (Crownshaw 2010: 3), the “metastasizing growth” of research endeavours (Olick 2007: 22), and references to the fact that anything and everything is branded with the label “memory”. A feeling of uneasiness is taking hold of memory researchers – not only because the topic seems to be more or less exhausted in the social sciences and humanities, but also because some believe that the enormous amount of research is not accompanied by an adequate progress in conceptual thought.1 Jeffrey Olick, for instance, characterises “social memory studies” as a “non-paradigmatic, transdiciplinary, and centerless enterprise” that reinvents the wheel over and over again (Olick 2009). 2 Against the backdrop of this impending stagnation, the turn towards a hitherto neglected aspect of memory seems to promise fresh momentum. Although slightly delayed compared to other fields, memory research is now performing a

1

See, for example, Kansteiner 2002.

2

With this comment, Olick endorses his earlier diagnosis, namely that memory studies “[…] have – from a scientific point of view – been a rather unproductive hodgepodge” (Olick 1999: 338, see also Olick & Robbins 1998).

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“spatial turn”.3 By addressing the spatial dimension of memory processes – an aspect of memory that had been previously assessed as more or less unproblematic – researchers beat a path for the investigation of more complex units of memory. Apart from the issue of the conditions and the functioning of “cosmopolitan memory”, as examined in Lévy and Sznaider’s much discussed volume (Lévy & Sznaider 2001), the question of “European memory” has become an important subject of debate.4 This new perspective is not only considered to be a political and societal desideratum but also a requirement in terms of the theory and pragmatics of research that is met with increasing acknowledgement in social sciences and humanities and finds its current expression in the term “transcultural memory”.5 The contributions in the present collection are likewise meant to be a complement to the majority of research that was and is dedicated to national memory; however it extends this discourse by taking on a reverse perspective to the one described. Most of the articles included here deal with the particular – with small, local, or regional memories – and with memories that can be labelled “peripheral” – “peripheral” in the sense that they were neither the focus of national or transnational (transcultural) memory culture nor a privileged subject of research.6 The contributions are based on presentations delivered at the international conference “Grand Narratives and Peripheral Memories” which assembled researchers from different disciplines in autumn 2009 at Luxemburg University in order to investigate both “big” and “small” memories.7 Presentations were given

3

On the “spatial turn“, see for example the volume published by Döring &Thielmann, which includes contributions from cultural studies, social sciences, and human geography (Döring & Thielmann 2008).

4

See Assmann 2007; Leggewie & Lang 2011; see also the contributions in Knigge et al. 2011 that go back to a conference in the context of the debate about the “House of European History” which is coming into being in Brussels. On “European memory sites”, see for example Majerus et al. 2009; see also Assmann & Conrad 2010, on the problem of “memory in a global age”.

5

See parallax 17(4), special issue on “Transcultural memory”, especially the introductory article by Astrid Erll (Erll 2011).

6

Of course, “peripheral” is not to be understood in the sense of geography, for example as the peripheral regions of Europe; on those, see for instance Leggewie & Land 2011.

7

The conference was held in the context of the research project “Collective experiences, intergenerational memory and identity constructions in Luxembourg. Witnesses of World War II, peasants, industrial workers, immigrants” (http://wwwfr.uni. lu/re-

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on the Second World War and German occupation, as well as on the Holocaust and the Chilean dictatorship, while others dealt with migration experiences, social transformation, political biography, and the everyday culture of “ordinary people”. The articles have in common that they pay particular attention to personal, and especially familial forms of memory and their representation. One of the objectives of the conference was to examine conceptual problems based on the example of these very different fields of memory. The conference thus started from the assumption that new insights about the transmission of memories and the emergence and perpetuation of memory collectives might by gained if, alongside the “big” memories and their narratives that have dominated research so far, different stories, narrative forms, and media would be addressed. Even though the present volume emphasises “small” or “peripheral” memories, the major research issues in the field are nonetheless present. The collection is inspired by the following question: in what way is the field of memory – its academic investigation as well as its immediate practice – shaped by the basic notions of memory theory that were predominantly developed in the context of research on the Second World War and the Holocaust? The articles are thus, among other things, concerned with the “framing” of these (small) memories through memory studies. Or, in other words, they are concerned with the fact that the analysis of memory processes might in turn impact these processes. Research itself is an element of and a factor in (global) memory culture. Although memory research has not yet, as Olick states, been able to establish a conceptual and methodological canon8, it has succeeded – to an astonishing extent – in shaping notions that are capable of making individual and collective memory needs plausible to a broader public, and that can be translated into diverse memory practices. As Sarah Radstone noticed, memory research displays three interwoven characteristics: “its urgent and committed engagement with varied instances of contemporary and historical violence, its close ties with questions of identity – and relatedly, with identity politics – and its bridging of the domains of the personal and the public, the individual and the social” (Radstone 2008: 33). While memory research, according to Radstone, shares these features with other research fields such as cultural studies, feminist studies, and ethnicity studies, its singularity can be located elsewhere: it explains the processes that take place within and between the different “memory spaces” that are constructed by re-

search/flshase/laboratoire_d_histoire/recherche/lux_id). We would like to express our gratitude to the Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg for its financial support. 8

In this context, see also Olick et al. 2011.

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search itself – individual, social, cultural, and public – in a way that transcends the borders between the disciplines. In other words, its distinctive character is a result of the transdisciplinary generation of certain “travelling concepts”, that is, concepts that can be linked to different phenomena and that are applicable in different contexts.9 In recent memory research, the notion of “trauma” in particular has become such a “travelling concept”. Traumatic memory seems to create a link between individual and collective processes and different cultural phenomena (ibid., p. 35). Jeffrey Olick, for example, argues that traumatic experiences do not only, as William James formulated, represent “thorns in the spirit” of the individual. Traumas can also be genuinely collective “insofar as historical events cannot easily be integrated into coherent and constructive narratives.” (Olick 1999: 344). 10 However when looking at the notion of trauma, it becomes also apparent that the appealing universality and the alleged explanatory power of such “travelling concepts” might obliterate the differences between these processes, and therefore they might be detrimental to an adequate analysis of diverse memory processes and forms of expression.11 Will the aforementioned reorientation of research claimed by Astrid Erll and others help to counteract the negative impacts of this conceptual nivellation? Such claims state that memories are moving across cultural and social borders, which is why it is necessary to turn away from “memory cultures” and rather try to focus on transcultural memory processes or “memories on the move”. This change of perspective not only leads to an acknowledgement of larger collectives – such as “Europe” or “humanity” – but also to the incorporation of all kinds of specific memory collectives, for instance those that grow out of music cultures or soccer (see Erll 2011a: 8).12

9

See also Said’s notion of “travelling theory” (Said 1983); on the issue of nomadising analytical concepts, see in particular Bal 2002.

10 This explains why Olick uses the example of traumatic events in order to explain the “multi-dimensional rapprochement” between “individualist” and “collectivist approaches to collective memory” or, as he also calls it, between “collected” and “collective” memory (Olick 1999); see also Giesen 2004. 11 See, among others, Luckhurst 2003; Radstone 2007; see also the contributions in Crownshaw et al. 2010; on a “theory of cultural trauma”, see Alexander 2004. 12 Erll explains elsewhere that memory represents a “soft skill” when it comes to attempts at regional integration, a capacity that can be enhanced, among other things, through the results of memory research (Erll 2010).

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However, the approach of “transcultural memory” does not address the problem of how different memory spaces or temporalities relate to one another in a satisfying way.13 Erll describes transcultural memory as, “the incessant wandering of carriers, media, contents, forms, and practices of memory, their continual ‘travels’ and ongoing transformations through time and space, across social, linguistic and political borders” (Erll 2011a: 11). In fact, this brings another “travelling concept” into play, namely, “mobility”.14 Under the influence of this notion, the memories themselves emerge, as it were, as mobile subjects. Their figurative, transcultural peregrination makes it possible to talk about transcultural memory and transboundary remembering, while the mechanisms of the transcending memory processes such as they take place in the actual subjects of memory remain vague and indeterminate. The demand to clarify the transmission processes between individual and collective memory – between intrapsychic, cognitive processes on the one hand and public, cultural processes on the other – is not becoming obsolete in the context of transcultural memory. On the contrary, it is becoming even more pressing since, due to additional translation processes, the emerging memory framings are becoming ever more complex. As stated above, the present volume is the result of an inverse perspective, insofar as our point of departure is the “locatedness” of memory. This does not mean that the contributing authors ignore or deny the movements of objects, practices, and media related to memory. However, in the following articles they do not seek to perform a cultural, historical, and spatial “tracking” of these elements. Instead, they attempt to analyse the processes that result in a “concretisation” of memories – processes that “locate” them due to the fact that our capacities to perceive and comprehend are “shaped by our inescapable histories and locatedness and culture” (Radstone 2011: 111).15 The volume is divided into three sections. The first section contains articles that are explicitly concerned with the relationship between memory and family

13 Erll tries to counter this problem by criticizing Halbwachs’ notion of “collective memory” which, as she says, is essentially linked to notions of similarity and identity. According to Erll, this “non-transcultural concept” mistakes “usable fictions which the groups believe in” for an analytical category (Erll 2011a: 10). 14 On the “new mobility paradigm“, see for example Sheller & Urry 2006; Canzler et al. 2008; Büscher & Urry 2009. 15 In this context, see Middleton & Brown on territoriality as an element of the “physiognomy” of collective memory frameworks as described by Halbwachs (Brown & Middleton 2005: 118-137). See also Langenohl 2005.

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relations. The authors take very different perspectives and use a variety of memory objects as examples. The French sociologist Anne MUXEL begins the section with an article in which she briefly summarizes the results of her study on la mémoire familiale (Muxel 1996), thus making her work accessible to English-language readers. When recent memory research in the social and cultural sciences investigates the topic of the family, it mostly does so in the context of the remembrance of significant historical events. Here, the family is understood as a kind of hinge or relaying mechanism between individual remembrance and public (in particular, national) memory. 16 However in French research we are more likely to find studies informed by a genuine interest in the family and transmission processes within families than in Anglo-American or German research.17 Muxel’s work, which analyzes the function of familial memory with regard to individual identity construction, is an example of this. On the one hand, it is based on the results of an empirical study – qualitative interviews with members of different social groups – and on the other hand, it is grounded in the analysis of the author’s own family history, that is, on a self-reflective remembrance process. This makes her article particularly interesting. Muxel starts from Halbwachs’ notion of the collective framing of memories, but turns her attention to the individual and her or his complex remembrance needs. She distinguishes between three basic functions of remembrance, and in this way constructs what she calls a “general framework which might be termed a ‘sociology of intimacy’”. The three functions – “transmission”, “revival”, and “reflexivity” – differ from each other in terms of their specific narrative modes, temporalities, and memory uses. This clarifying distinction of functions undoubtedly enriches memory research in the social and cultural sciences, since this research as yet has barely been concerned in a systematic way with the complexity and changeability of individual remembrance needs, for instance, with the way age can impact memory. Muxel’s framework moreover shows that the question of which memory collective we mean when we talk about “family” needs further examination as well. For example, her work shows how, as a rule,

16 See Lenz & Welzer 2007; see also Erll 2011b. 17 See, for example, Zonabend (1980) on familial time and historical time (or temps événementielle); Gaulejac (1999) on the function of familial remembrance; AttiasDonfut et al. (2002) on different types of familial transmission; Segalen & Michelat (1991) on the growing interest in genealogy among considerable parts of the population; Oeser & Gollac (2011) on the results of an interdisciplinary German-French comparative survey on familial transmission; however also see Keppler’s (1994) and Coenen-Huther’s (1994) works on German and Swiss families respectively.

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relationships between siblings were neglected in research in favour of relationships between generations and thus, to a certain degree, in favour of a certain function of memory. The book’s second article nonetheless investigates intergenerational transmission processes using the example of the very object that is essential to this entire field of research: the remembrance of National Socialist crimes. Social scientist Jan LOHL delivers a critical analysis of Harald Welzer and his colleagues’ work at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen (see primarily, Welzer et al. 2002). Starting from psychoanalytical concepts of emotional dynamics within families, and based on the corresponding studies about the problem of remembering the “Third Reich“, Lohl calls for a deeper examination of familial loyalty. Welzer et al. refer to the latter in their attempt to show how children and grandchildren do not want to hear about their parents’ and grandparents’ crimes. According to Lohl, this attitude of loyalty should not simply be understood as a correlative or a product of familial closeness; instead it should be interpreted as an “aggressively induced obligation”. The mechanisms Lohl discusses have been most clearly described when reflecting on the remembrance of National Socialism in German families. However, they are equally crucial when it comes to understanding processes of intergenerational transmission in general. In a way, sociologist Daniela JARA’s contribution about the “post-coup second generation” in Chile adds to Lohl’s psychoanalytically inspired criticism of the abovementioned analysis of memory narratives. Jara focuses the second generation and the experience of state violence this generation inherited from their parents. This heritage, she argues, is overshadowed by the first generation’s traumatic experiences, and therefore cannot be “worked through“. In her analysis of three life histories, she does not only consider the silence of the “post-coup” generation – the “children of Pinochet” – and their inability to talk about the experiences of violence and fear they inherited from their parents; moreover, she discusses the bodily dimension of memory, the physical experience and the remembrance of threat and fragility, and the associated feelings of weakness and shame that are also inscribed on the body. Similarly, the article by Renée WAGENER, a social scientist, is also concerned with experiences of transmitting violence and oppression. Her research is dedicated to the passing on of memories of the Second World War and of the German occupation in Luxembourgian families, and centres upon fundamental questions of methodology and conceptualisation that are generally important for memory research. Wagener conducted a three-generation study that shows, among other things, how both the first generation’s individual war memories as

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well as the historical knowledge that is passed on in the national master narrative are handed down in a very rudimentary form through family memory, especially when it comes to grandchildren. These results prompt Wagener to question the notion of the family as the most important functional framework of memory processes and as an instance of conveyance of historical knowledge. Apart from the overall problem of younger generations’ “historylessness“, she claims that in view of transformed family structures, it is time to review the “three-generation family” model that still dominates research on social memory. One could say that Elisabeth BOESEN, a cultural anthropologist, takes the inverse position in her article when she makes the case for expanding the traditional notion of family from the direct line of descendents to collateral relatives (uncles, aunts, etc.). At first glance, one might think that this argument is specific to the object of her research: rural families in Luxembourg. However, her reflections – like those of Wagener – are meant to be a general criticism of the concept of “family” within memory research. Moreover, Boesen uses the example of farming families in order to show that familial memories are individual and collective “commentaries” on other transmission processes, especially on the transmission and on the more or less successful appropriation of material and immaterial heritages (namely, in the case of the farmers, the house and the farm) – and therefore they need to be investigated as such. This insight also has conceptual and methodological implications. The example of the farming milieu serves to emphasise the importance of particular social and cultural conditions for familial transmission processes, and consequently, the need for a specific hermeneutic preunderstanding. Part two of the volume explores the nexus between public and private objects of memory. The first two articles inquire into the memories of “ordinary people”, and into attempts to turn these memories into public objects, i.e., to create or facilitate the appropriate modes of remembrance. While the authors choose very different approaches, both texts look into the fundamental questions of whether it is possible to represent “ordinary lives” and what impacts these public portrayals might have. The first article is yet again concerned with the farming and rural milieu. The historian Rita GARSTENAUER presents her study on farmers’ autobiographies that were not only collected, but also partly published and even solicited by the Dokumentation lebensgeschichtlicher Aufzeichnungen (Collection of Biographical Records) at the University of Vienna. The results of her analysis of the metadata of this extensive body show that the very diverse reception contexts in which these autobiographies originated – and above all the various degrees to which they are public – have a clear impact on the texts both in terms of content

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and form. Garstenauer’s work is remarkable, not least because she succeeds in combining her historical interrogation with sociological and philological concepts such as “intertextuality” and “interdiscourse”. Cultural anthropologist and museologist Elizabeth CARNEGIE’s essay then addresses the attempts made by several museums in the United Kingdom to uncover the “difficult” and painful aspects of “ordinary people’s” lives in their exhibitions. The author comments primarily on the questionable aspects of these attempts; for instance, the fact that the collective of “ordinary people” is only created by means of its public representation. She also asks what kind of impact this way of fixing life histories and living conditions has or might have on the “exhibited” people’s individual development potentials, as their participation in these endeavours – in contrast to academic research – is not anonymous. Sociologist Delyth EDWARDS draws on the results of her doctoral thesis to examine the cultural representation of orphans in public life in the Republic of Ireland, as well as the question of how these representations influence orphans’ autobiographical memories. In many respects, her research topic represents a very specific case of remembering “the difficult lives of ordinary people”. First, the orphan child has been an object of cultural imagination at least since the 19th century. As Edwards argues, the orphan child represents “the ‘grotesque other’ and the ‘moral dirt’ of Irish society”. Second, this case is also noticeable because orphans are more than non-orphans dependent on public narratives, and may even be at their mercy. In many cases, they do not possess their own family memories. Therefore, “absent memory” – also their own absence in the memory of their biological family of origin – can represent to them the very core of their existence. Edwards also touches upon the question of how these missing memories are transferred onto the “post-orphan generation”, and in this way makes her own “inherited” memories an object of her analysis. Fellow contributor Daniela Jara, who is a member of the Chilean “post-coup generation”, makes a similar move when she investigates this group in her dissertation. The absence or impossibility of familial remembrance is the focus of both these authors’ research. Even though Jara, in contrast to Edwards, only incidentally notes that she shares her interview partners’ experiences, it becomes clear with both authors that their particular affinities to their objects of research represents an important basis for understanding. The final contribution of the second section is similarly dedicated to memories of “the people”. Historian Denis SCUTO presents the results from a study on Luxembourgian steel worker families and on the question of the transmission of the experience of social change, in particular regarding the declining steel

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industry and the associated history of the affected workforce. Based on the results of this empirical study, Scuto analyses the nexus between the public discourse of the state, the collective memory of the workers’ movement, and the private, familial processes of remembrance. Using the example of two threegeneration families, he shows, among other things, that familial memories are substantially impacted by structural conditions, such as the education level and the factual social advancement of family members, and how both the “grand narrative” about the national steel industry as well as the mémoire du mouvement ouvrier are passed on from the perspective of the small and local social spaces. The third section of this collection consists of articles that investigate the problem of the social constitution of memory collectives. In the first text, historian Joseph MASLEN examines the family memories of British communists, thus providing a complement to Scuto’s contribution. While Scuto is interested in the impact of the (national) steel industry and workforce’s public narrative, Maslen examines familial history as an element of national political history. Based on the example of one family, he demonstrates that the family memories of British communists, and more precisely, the memories of the generation of children born in the 1940s, challenge the grand narrative about the “sixties” as a time of fundamental sociocultural change and therefore do not fit into the collective memory of the “children of the revolution”. The contribution of the cultural anthropologist Daniela KOLEVA is similarly concerned with the nexus between the family and other memory collectives. However, she investigates social conditions that seem to be more complex than the ones mentioned before, where two memory frameworks – familial memory and public memory (that essentially corresponds with a national history and remembrance culture) – were opposing each other or interacting with one another. Koleva presents the example of a family that is part of the Turkish minority in Bulgaria, and therefore belongs to an ethnic “mnemonic community”. Moreover, the two analysed generations – mother and daughter – spent decisive periods of their lives in different politico-societal entities, namely, socialist and postsocialist Bulgaria. Koleva analyzes the question of to what extent familial memory is a “contested terrain” on which different versions of the past – that result from belonging to different mnemonic communities and particularly from belonging to different generations – compete with each other. This article, which is about the possibilities to individually disengage from familial traditions – from memory as habitus – represents in a way a counterpart to Lohl’s contribution, where he shows how familial dynamics oblige the children to adhere to their parents’ memories. Koleva’s article is also noteworthy in that it is the only contribution included here that addresses the gender specifics of memory processes.

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Sociologist Alena PFOSER also dedicates her article to a plural setting, namely, memories and the historical consciousness of adolescents from migrant families in Austria. Starting from an empirical study that examined how young people receive national historical memory through schooling and the media and incorporate it into their identity constructions, Pfoser uses the example of a young man born in Vienna to a family of Bosnian Serbs in order to demonstrate how different memory frameworks and narratives interact with one another. She emphasises the adolescents’ multiperspectivity, and the strategic nature of their appropriation of particular narratives and myths from Austrian history, for example the idea that Austria was Hitler’s first victim. This volume concludes with Jeanette HOFFMANN’s contribution. Hoffman presents the results from her pedagogical dissertation on the subject of Holocaust remembrance among German and Polish secondary school students. Hoffmann also focuses on the multiperspectivity of adolescent historical consciousness. Yet, in contrast to Pfoser, she is mostly interested in “forms of narrative presentation”, or rather, in different narrative contexts. On the one hand, she identifies the family and the street, and on the other hand, literature and the school. These four forms correspond more or less to the distinction between communicative and cultural memory. In her study, Hoffmann draws the conclusion that the literary form of transferring historical memory is of essential importance since it allows people “to approach the past from different perspectives and to experience its contradictions”. For this reason, she suggests a third category of memory processes that is situated between communicative and cultural remembrance, namely, memory in “lingua-cultural and institutional contexts”. The contributions collected in this volume demonstrate that studies on memory processes that are concerned with “the peripheral” as defined above are inspiring for memory research in general, and can provide new impulses with regard to conceptual and methodological questions. Of course, this volume can only supply a very limited impression of the diversity of such memory processes and of possible ways to investigate them. Apart from a few exceptions, the contributions are based on the results of empirical, qualitative studies where memories are primarily elucidated by means of interviews. Artistic and other symbolic forms of expression are almost entirely left out of consideration. The same applies to the field of sensorial remembrance18, to name but two more manifestations of memory.

18 See for example Seremetakis 1996; Koureas 2008.

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R EFERENCES Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2004): Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma. In: Alexander, Jeffrey C. et al.: Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press; pp. 1-30. Assmann, Aleida (2007): Europe: A Community of Memory? (20 th Annual Lecture of the German Historical Institute). GHI Bulletin 40:11-25. Assmann, Aleida & Sebastian Conrad (Eds.) (2010): Memory in Global Age. Discourses, Practices and Trajectories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Attias-Donfut, Claudine, Nicole Lapierre & Martine Segalen (2002): Le nouvel esprit de famille. Paris: Jacob. Bal, Mieke (2002): Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Büscher, Monika & John Urry (2009): Mobile Methods and the Empirical. European Journal of Social Theory 12(1): 99-116. Canzler, Weert, Vincent Kaufmann & Sven Kesselring (2008): Tracing Mobilities. An Introduction. In: Canzler, Weert, Vincent Kaufmann & Sven Kesselring (Eds.): Tracing Mobilities. Towards a Cosmopolitan Perspective. Aldershot: Ashgate; pp. 1-10. Coenen-Huther, Josette (1994): La mémoire familiale. Paris: L’Harmattan. Crownshaw, Rick (2010): The Future of Memory. Introduction. In: Crownshaw, Richard, Jane Kilby & Anthony Rowland (Eds.): The Future of Memory. New York: Berghahn; pp. 3-15. Crownshaw, Richard, Jane Kilby & Anthony Rowland (Eds.) (2010): The Future of Memory. New York: Berghahn. Döring, Jörg & Tristan Thielmann (Hg.) (2008): Spatial Turn. Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften. Bielefeld: Transcript. Erll, Astrid (2011a): Travelling Memory. Parallax: 17(4):4-18. – (2011b): Locating Family in Cultural Memory Studies. Journal of Comparative Family Studies 43(3): 303-318. – (2010): Regional Integration and (trans)cultural memory. Asia Europe Journal 8(3): 305-315. Gaulejac, Vincent de (1999): L’histoire en héritage. Roman familial et trajectoire sociale. Paris: Desclée De Brouver. Giesen, Bernhard (2004): Triumph and Trauma. Boulder: Paradigm. Gollac, Sibylle & Alexandra Oeser (2011): Comparing Family Memories in France and Germany: The Production of History(ies) within and through Kin Relations. Journal of Comparative Family Studies 43(3): 385-397.

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Huyssen, Andreas (2003): Present pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kansteiner, Wulf (2002): Finding a Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies. History and Memory 41: 179-197. Keppler, Angela (1994): Tischgespräche. Über Formen der Vergemeinschaftung am Beispiel der Konversation in Familien. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Knigge, Volkhard et al. (Hg.) (2011): Arbeit am europäischen Gedächtnis. Diktaturerfahrung und Demokratieentwicklung. Köln: Böhlau. Koureas, Gabriel (2008): Trauma, Space and Embodiment: The Sensorium of a Divided City. Journal of War and Culture Studies 1 (3), pp. 309-324. Langenohl, Andreas (2005): Ort und Erinnerung. Diaspora in der transnationalen Konstellation. In: Oesterle, Günter (Hg.): Erinnerung, Gedächtnis, Wissen. Studien zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Gedächtnisforschung. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Rupprecht; pp. 611-623. Leggewie, Claus & Anne Lang (2011): Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung. Ein Schlachtfeld wird besichtigt. München: Beck. Lenz, Claudia & Harald Welzer (2007): Opa in Europa. Erste Befunde einer vergleichenden Tradierungsforschung. In: Welzer, Harald (Hg.): Der Krieg der Erinnerung: Holocaust, Kollaboration und Widerstand im europäischen Gedächtnis. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer; pp. 7-40. Lévy, Daniel & Nathan Sznaider (2001): Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. Luckhurst, Roger (2003): Traumaculture. New Formations 50: 28-47. Majerus, Benoît et al. (Éd./Hg.) (2009): Dépasser le cadre national des “lieux de mémoire”. Innovations méthodologiques, approches comparatives, lectures transnationales / Nationale Erinnerungsorte hinterfragt. Methodologische Innovationen, vergleichende Annäherungen, transnationale Lektüren. Bruxelles: P.I.E. Peter Lang. Middleton, David & Steven D. Brown (2005): The Social Psychology of Experience: Studies in Remembering and Forgetting. London: Sage. Muxel, Anne (1996): Individu et mémoire familiale. Paris: Collin. Olick, Jeffrey K. (2009): Between Chaos and Diversity: Is Social Memory Studies a Field? International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 22: 249252. – (2007): “Collective Memory”: A Memoir and Prospect. Memory Studies 1(1): 19-25. – (1999): Collective Memory: The Two Cultures. Sociological Theory 17(3): 333-348.

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Olick, Jeffrey K. & Joyce Robbins (1998): Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices. Annual Review of sociology 24: 105-140. Olick, Jeffrey K., Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi & Daniel Lévy (Eds.) (2011): The Collective Memory Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Radstone, Susannah (2011): What Place is this? Transcultural Memory and the Locations of Memory Studies. Parallax 17(4): 109-123. – (2008): Memory studies: For and against. Memory Studies 1(1): 31-39. – (2007): Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics. Paragraph 30(1): 9-29. Said, Edward W. (1983): Travelling Theory. In: Edward W. Said: The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard University Press; pp. 226-247. Segalen, Martine & Claude Michelat (1991): L’amour de la généalogie. In: Martine Segalen (Éd.): Jeux de familles. Paris: Presses du Centre de la Recherche Scientifique; pp. 193-208. Seremetakis, C. Nadia (Ed.) (1994):The Senses Still. Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Boulder: Westview Sheller, Mimi & John Urry (2006): The New Mobilities Paradigm. Environment and Planning A 38: 207-226. Welzer, Harald, Sabine Moller & Karoline Tschuggnall (2002): “Opa war kein Nazi“. Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. Zonabend, Françoise (1980): La mémoire longue. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

The Functions of Familial Memory and Processes of Identity A NNE M UXEL

The subject of familial memory conjures up a wealth of images and sentiments familiar to everyone. This very familiarity contributes to making work on the question difficult as the subject is omnipresent and its illustrative qualities are made use of without measure. It is also a constantly recurring subject in literature. Therefore, in order to build a sociological approach to the question, a clear definition is needed together with a clear delimitation of its boundaries. Memory is a multifaceted concept that is often interchanged with other similar concepts and used as an equivalent: transmission, inheritance, tradition, history, and identity, to cite the most obvious. The question of memory poses problems to sociologists particularly because of its almost indiscernible boundaries and countless possible interpretations. Moreover, the content of memory itself is fragmented and composed of recollections that are themselves difficult to interpret and interrelate. Remembering is a fleeting process in which images are short-lived, often unexpected and unpredictable. It is not intentional, nor is it the result of a process of reasoning.1 Because of its elusive nature, work on memory is necessarily difficult to undertake both for the individual and even more so for the sociologist. The topic focuses here on individual familial memory rather than on collective memory. This does not preclude the fact that individual memory also includes collective aspects and contributes to the shaping of a collective family memory, which is first of all plural in the sense that it results from the memories of different individuals put together. It also depends on various temporalities, including biographical, generational, contextual and historical temporalities. 1

For more analysis, see Muxel 1996.

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Many dimensions have to be taken into account and sifted through in order to understand how both an individual and a collective memory is constructed. Maurice Halbwachs, a French sociologist and student of Emile Durkheim, was the first sociologist to propose a framework for the interpretation of memory. His work, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire2, published in 1925, and a few years later, La mémoire collective3, changed the focus of the debate that was then raging among spiritual and materialist philosophers for whom memories were first and foremost the product of an individual’s experience and personality. Going against the philosopher Henri Bergson’s dominant theory of the time, Halbwachs introduced an entirely new way of looking at memories. Rather than being shaped only by the life of an individual, memories are also shaped by society. An individual’s memories are produced in a series of social and collective interrelations, without which the memories would neither exist nor be expressed. The first question is therefore: how exactly does an individual recall the past and how can sociological and historical backgrounds, on the one hand, and affective idiosyncrasy, on the other, be accounted for? The main difficulty in answering this question is that both of these factors work together. The second question is: since individual and collective memories cannot be dissociated, how are these two kinds of mechanisms reconciled to engender a memory that can only be the result of a compromise between personal and collective norms whose very formation implies a re-evaluation of the past in the eyes of the present? Maurice Halbwachs furnished numerous guidelines for a comprehensive and analytical interpretation of those mechanisms. The three most important of these are listed below.4 First, each individual memory takes place from a given perspective within the collective memory of the familial group. It changes with the individual’s evolving position in the life cycle, as well as in the wider society. Second, as a consequence, the family’s collective memory is not at all homogeneous. It is the result of a series of compromises and re-evaluations constantly affected by circumstances existing within the group, but also by individual biographical events. It involves a process of piecing together the past from the vantage point of the present.

2

Halbwachs 1925.

3

Halbwachs 1950.

4

See the chapter on “Mémoire collective et mémoire historique” in: Halbwachs 1950; pp. 35-79.

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Third, memory manifests itself in two forms. Maurice Halbwachs places the first of these within the framework of an “individual” personality or personal life. The other form is more impersonal and concerns recollections having to do primarily with the group and thus with collective memory. In sociological studies, memories of the first kind are largely ignored, except when considered for their illustrative function. They more often find a place in the fields of literature and psychoanalysis which are concerned with emotions and images through which memories find expression. Sociologists work mostly with familial memory of the second kind: the collective memory of a group. This type of memory is considered to be an expression of a common family identity, transmitted from one generation to the next, acting as an anchoring-point for traditions and the maintenance of family characteristics. This article concentrates mostly on the first perspective in an effort to integrate social and individual approaches. This involves conciliating personal and collective memories in order to understand the meaning individuals attribute to the past and the use they make of it. It was essential while doing this to keep in mind that the work involves dealing with much subjectivity, not only that of the individuals interviewed but also my own. For this reason, I sketched out a general framework which might be termed a “sociology of intimacy”. 5 Familial memory is of interest to sociologists for at least three reasons: The first of these is that it contributes to the construction of social and personal identity. It reveals much that can be used to understand the transaction between the individual and society. It shows how subjectivity and intimacy, on the one hand, and norms and value systems, on the other, are conciliated. The second reason for this interest is that it takes into account the specific effect of time on individual representations and explanations about social status and position. Working on memory involves primarily working on the dimension of time. How are the past, present and future linked? In what way do they work together to explain an individual’s trajectory and give it meaning? Before going any further, the following definition should be specified relative to this chapter: memory is not only the past, memory is the present of the past.6 This definition is significant as it means that the past is not entirely behind the individual or prior to the present. The past is within the present, and even ahead of the individual. In day to day life, it informs how the individual thinks,

5

By intimacy, I mean the core of identity, as a result of the individuals’ subjective interpretation of their personal history and idiosyncrasies. This intimacy is made of affects, feelings, emotions, understandings and reconstructions.

6

See Saint Augustin’s “Confessions”; see also Halbwachs 1925.

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acts, relates to others, etc. The individual constantly has to deal with the past, negotiating with it more or less consciously. The third reason is that familial memory is of interest because it entails thinking about the truth. Truth is a big word whose meaning in this context should perhaps be elaborated on. In ‘The Lisbon Story’, a film directed by Wim Wenders based on memories of the city of Lisbon, Manoel de Oliveira is interviewed and says: “Memory is an invention. However, the problem is that memory tells the only ‘truth’”. This proposition is very relevant as working on memory implies dealing with this paradox constantly. The problem is the same for both collective and historical memory.7 The following section gives a brief presentation of the method and the empirical data upon which this chapter is based. This was a qualitative study in which 40 people were interviewed and their narrative memory collected as a story. They were chosen according to specific social, gender and age criteria. In-depth interviewing began with non-directive questions: “Could you tell me about your family memories? What do these memories mean to you”? After quite a long period of time (about 30 min.) during which interviewees indulged in free thinking, more precise questions were asked in an attempt to focus on the specific content of the family memories. Each interview lasted about three hours. The research also used other types of material such as literature and studies realized in other fields of research: psychoanalysis, anthropology and philosophy. Due to the fact that my own subjectivity had to be taken into consideration, (this is an integral part of the topic), I went further and introduced elements of my own personal family memories into the research. When writing the book, it became evident that this internal narration had to be included.8 The material was therefore very complete and very complex in that I was involved in it by design. The methodological framework itself was also complex. Let us turn now to the results. It would be difficult in this short chapter to provide a full account of the results. The focus will therefore be on the main aspects of the question and the presentation of two different kinds of results: one on the contents of familial memory and the other on its different functions. This will allow for some more detailed answers to the two questions asked above. First, how do individuals recall the past and what meaning do they attribute to it?

7

Collective memory is the memory shared by a group, historical memory is a memory which can concern the entire society.

8

Muxel, op. cit.

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Second, how are personal and collective norms conciliated to form a familial memory?

T HE C ONTENTS

OF

F AMILIAL M EMORY

It would be an impossible task to make an exclusive list of the contents of familial memory. This is because familial memory is primarily a story or a reconstruction, as indicated above. It relies on many different kinds of material: images, emotions, impressions, sensory memories and also places, things, etc. All of these elements are included in the narration and used in different ways to serve the individual’s identity and his or her personal goals and sense of self-esteem. The work involved carrying out a comprehensive analysis of the interviews and stories collected. This allowed for a classification of the contents to be made together with a hierarchical organisation of the material, describing the importance each of the stories had in the construction of familial memory. This is necessarily a somewhat reductive process, but it is nonetheless relevant. Familial memory might be described as belonging to four circles, each of which containing a different type of memory. These four circles fit into each other much as a Russian Babushka doll does. The relevance of this image is that it represents memory as the result of several strata with varying degrees of consistency or durability. In other words, to use a geological metaphor, memory results from beds of sedimentation with varying degrees of depth and solidity depending on the kind of material of which they consist. The first type of memory, which is the deepest and most resistant type, is sensory memory.9 It forms the core of the individual’s familial memory. Because it is maintained within the sensory body experience itself: smell, sound, touch, etc., its contents cannot be erased. The senses fix the memory. One can be transported elsewhere in time by a sudden breath of air, a scent inhaled or a noise overheard. Scenes of a former life can appear before ones’ eyes by means of the senses. The senses open up the pathways of memory leading to reminiscence. They can bring back the physical décor and also the emotions of long ago to the surface. At the same time, however, it is also the most unpredictable type of memory, as sensory memory returns individual consciousness to the past without warning. Marcel Proust was the most famous writer to describe what he called la mémoire involontaire (involuntary memory) which he contrasts with the sterile memory

9

See Muxel, op. cit., particularly chapter IV.

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of intelligence which cannot retain anything of the past.10 This type of true, indelible memory is involuntary as it escapes reason. It consists of raw, unprocessed emotions and sensations experienced in the past. However, it is most often hidden, having sunk into oblivion. The memory may be triggered by the senses and is always unpredictable. It functions as the unconscious mind of familial memory; all the details are there but they have been suppressed. When the memory surfaces, when it can be perceived and decoded, it reveals something real and transports the individual back into the past. It brings back to life that which had been buried the deepest. This kind of familial memory is intimate and personal. It cannot be shared with anyone else, even with those who have lived the same past family life. It is necessarily a solitary type of remembrance. The second type of memory is not unlike the first. It is made up of memories relating to physical experience.11 This includes both personal physical experiences and memories as well as those of other members of the family. People who have died are remembered by individuals who are still living through their gestures and physical appearances. Portraits of them are constructed through memory. People who are no longer alive continue to exist through specific images, such as those of their hands, voices, or other details of their physical presence. Physical memory also takes another shape. The body tells the story of everyone. It keeps traces of childhood and family experience in mind. Body memory carries the imprint of the family’s affective life. The warmth of the cuddle at bedtime or the sting of a slap is carved into the deepest part of the individual’s being. Little by little, the body becomes marked by the characteristic stigmata of intra-familial exchanges and particularities. The body forgets little. It retains everything including both desires felt and suffering experienced. The body provides the opportunity to relive these experiences in the past. It is impregnated with the past. Similarly to sensory memory, body memory is individual and personal and cannot be transmitted to anyone else. The content of the third circle is concrete: places, things, photographs, etc., provide concrete traces of the past which can be kept for oneself and can also be shown to others and transmitted. They provide the opportunity for a direct mediation with the past. They recall scenery, the décor of the time, etc. They can be described as objective traces even if they are the result of a specific choice. A decision has to be made about which item should be kept and which one thrown

10 Proust, 1954, Volume III; p. 872. 11 See Muxel, op. cit, particularly chapter V.

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away. They are visible and proof of the individual’s own negotiation with the concrete past. They maintain the sense of a common belonging to a collective group and contribute to the expression and assertion of this feeling. This kind of memory allows the symbolic and affective existence of the family to be shown. Objects, photographs and places that have been kept can be handed from one person to another. Individual and collective memories are more strongly connected in this circle. They necessarily work together. Beyond the social and economic particularities of one’s own family, this concrete memory also provides information about ways of life, morals and customs belonging to the past. Objects and photographs transmit a collective memory which subsists and develops meaning beyond only purely familial attachment. The fourth circle contains a more collective type of memory. It is almost entirely made up of collective memories and the sense of group identity is primordial. Collective memory concerns the familial group rather than just the individual. It needs to be shared by all family members in order to be relevant.12 This circle is made up of what can be talked about together and of what can be remembered together. It contains all the stories, legends and myths the family has built up over time, transmitting these from one generation to the next. In this case, transmission plays an essential role, as shall be seen later. Above all, this type of memory creates a collective sense of belonging for all members of the family. As can be seen above, this hierarchical structure started with the most private and intimate type of familial memory, finishing with the most collective type. It is clear, however, that even if these different circles have been structured hierarchically, they all work together and all form parts of an individual’s narration of memory. The aim here has essentially been to disentangle them. The return of a memory is less subjective and more collectively shared. It is a story that can be told together. A common memory between brothers and sisters, cousins or other relatives, all members of the same family, can be built and transmitted from one generation to the next.

T HE F UNCTIONS

OF

F AMILIAL M EMORY

How individuals recall the past and to what uses these memories are put shall now be examined. Three functions of the act of remembering can be identified, all of which shed light on the way in which familial memory contributes to the

12 See Muxel, op. cit.; pp. 196-198.

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construction of social and personal identity. These functions are transmission, revival and reflexivity (see table page 31). Transmission may be the easiest to understand.13 It is also the most predictable and usual in discussions about familial memory. Memory is used to transmit attributes that the familial group wants to conserve and which are essential for the continued maintenance of a collective identity from one generation to the next. Individuals find significant elements for their own personal and social identity in this transmitted collective memory. These elements allow them to confirm their belonging to a collective and specific history: through them, they can recognize their common origin, identify their place in the family genealogy and maintain special rituals and values which can be shared with others. In this sense, this aspect of familial memory is quite normative. It defines a collective belonging with its specific rules and codes. As shown in the table below, it is the ‘us’ which is relevant in the narration and which gives its meaning to familial memory. Within the notion of transmission, there are three kinds of specific memories, all of which signal collective belonging: Archaeological memory provides a narrative about origins. It is a way of answering the question: where do I come from? Individuals need to know something about the past before their own life began. Archaeological memories do not belong to the individual personally. They are transmitted by parents and grandparents, and are not part of the individual’s temporality. This type of memory does not contain the individual personal history, but rather the story of the family before the individual was born. Referential memory defines a kind of familial framework with specific values, experiences and references that can be used as a guideline to form and interpret the individual’s present value system. The past is used as a compass helping the individual to navigate in the present. For example, when children are born, the parents’ own upbringing is remembered, allowing them to decide whether or not to do the same with their children. This type of familial memory shows the process of reproduction at work within the family. This is especially true with regard to ideological attitudes and behaviours which are still the most transmissible elements in families, more so than ways of life or moral attitudes and norms, for example. Ritual memory. Here again, memory is primarily normative. It maintains a familial spirit and sense of belonging This part of the transmission process is more expressive and more affective than the previous two types. It consecrates

13 See Muxel, op.cit, chapter I.

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the most significant moments of family life, keeping them alive so that they might be transmitted. This process is repetitive rather than continuous. Each individual plays the same role in the same scenes each time. Ritual memory is mobilized to make the family more cohesive and give it a soul, maintaining its very identity. It serves as a kind of folklore, especially when the family meet together on festive occasions, for instance: the meals on these occasions are always organized in the same way, the same stories are told and the same songs are sung. This is the most collective element of familial memory. It is also the most respected element and the one which is most shared by everyone. Before attending such a festive occasion each individual knows what will happen in advance. This folklore serves as a link between all members of the family. The second function identified is the revival function. 14 With revival, memory works to bring the past to life. It brings the past back with its specific emotions, sensations, feelings, etc., quite as if the individual were still living in this past period of life. This type of memory places the past in the present and allows the individual to turn from the present to the past. For this reason, this type of familial memory can be defined as intemporal. The past is alive within the individual again, returning to the present by many different means. These are always sudden and unpredictable and, above all, tend to be sensory memories. Remembering brings back childhood experiences and the specific traces they have left behind. This type of memory is primarily made up of images as vibrant as paintings which the individual feels they could walk right into. The past is enclosed in a very intimate and private experience. These memories are in the two deepest circles of familial memory as described above. One can visualize the places in the past and relive the feelings of the time in the past. The same sensations, both positive and negative, can be experienced again. Familiar sounds can be heard and familiar fragrances smelt. When the revival function is at work, sensory memory is dominant. These memories cancel out the perception of time. As a result, the individual experiences an impression of eternity. Reflexivity is the third function and is more intellectual in nature. 15 In this case, memory evaluates the past and draws up a balance sheet of the individual trajectory. Remembering is a conscious act which enables the development of a critical perspective. It allows lessons to be learned from past experience. Where do I come from? Where am I going? What can I do with this past which is mine, but which also belongs to others? Remembering allows individuals to establish a certain distance from the past and at the same time to develop a prospective vi-

14 Idem. 15 Ibidem.

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sion of their future personal life. In the table, the narrative mode is ‘I’ (‘I’ in this respect means the fact of having a reflexive attitude towards memories and, moreover, towards the whole life span). In this case, the discourse objectivizes the past in that it places memories and the narrative story at some distance from the present. This type of memory supposes that the individual remembering is active rather than passive and has some degree of control over the past and, above all, over the significance of the past in the present life. It proposes both a retrospective and a prospective evaluation of the individual’s life. When this function is engaged, memory acts as an interpreter to understand the individual trajectory, recapitulating events for a better understanding of them. This recapitulation, which is also a type of negotiation, is necessarily selective and sorts through memories in order to arrange the past based on the present situation. Negotiation also allows for the elimination of negative experiences and suffering which individuals would not wish to repeat with their own children when they become parents. Examples of elements from the past which might be rejected include a lack of tenderness between parents and children, too much emotional pressure during childhood, traumatisms, accidents, death, etc. Reactions to familial characteristics and to the parental value system or type of upbringing might also be mentioned here. It should be remembered that familial memory is not necessarily positive. At the very least, it is always ambivalent, even among people who are attached to their past experiences and to their family. Before concluding this chapter, a word should be said about an issue which is central to understanding how memory works: the act of forgetting. As can be seen in the table below, forgetting plays a consistent role in how memory works and has a specific use according to each function identified above. When the second function is active, forgetting is used as a safeguard. It allows the individual to evacuate painful elements from memories of personal experience which provoke suffering. Psychoanalysis has identified these selfprotective mechanisms. One cannot continue to remember excessive suffering. In this sense, forgetting is a way of taking care of oneself. With regard to the third function, forgetting is much more complicated to understand but its role is undoubtedly decisive. Referring back to Manuel de Oliveira’s sentence on memory quoted above: memory is an invention but the only truth. The question of truth is central to work on memory. Within the framework proposed here, the dimension of the truth is much more present and relevant in this third function than in the other two. Reflexivity indicates that memory really involves work and is the result of a negotiation. And this negotiation can be understood as a means to approach the truth.

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The functions of family memory and their expressions Functions of the Family Memory Transmission

Use of Memory To maintain a collective identity

Narrative mode Us

Status of the Discourse

Time

Role of Forgetting

Normative

Historical Past

To introduce new elements, new references, new values A safeguard for oneself

Collective

Revival

To bring the past to life

Me

Subjective

Atemporal

Reflexivity

To evaluate the past and to develop a prospective view for the future

I

Personal Objectivising the past

Retrospective

A means of approaching the truth

Personal

The three functions of familial memory described in this chapter – transmission, revival and reflexivity – co-exist most of the time within the same life story. However, they contribute in different amounts to the building of each individual identity, as the degree to which they are developed or fostered varies with each person. They reinterpret the past to give it meaning in the present. The work accomplished by memory shapes not only social but also affective and personal identity. It takes place in the interaction between the individual’s subjectivity and the collective familial norm and is elaborated upon and readjusted, contingent on the particular circumstances marking out each individual life. Memory sometimes brings about a sense of belonging to the family and sometimes a desire for separation, sometimes a need for affiliation and sometimes a demand for independence. This is where both continuity and rupture with familial bonds are written. This is where the constant negotiation which every individual undertakes with their own life story becomes apparent.

R EFERENCES Halbwachs. Maurice (1925): Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Alcan (Réédition Mouton, Paris 1976) – (1950): La mémoire collective. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (Réédition 1968)

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Muxel, Anne (1996): Individu et mémoire familiale, Paris: Nathan (Nouvelle édition Hachette Pluriel, Paris 2007). Proust, Marcel (1954): Le temps retrouvé. Paris: Gallimard. Saint Augustin (1947): Les confessions. Paris: Moray.

“Totally Average Families”? Thoughts on the Emotional Dimension in the Intergenerational Transmission of Perspectives on National Socialism J AN L OHL

In Germany, the Holocaust is family history, as it was once formulated by Raul Hillberg (Hillberg, as quoted in Assmann 2007: 214). As soon as one starts thinking about this phenomenon, she will stumble across the study Opa war kein Nazi (“Grandpa wasn’t a Nazi”), to which the general public relates as positively as to any academic publications regarding the handling of the national socialist past. In this article, I will critically evaluate selected results and especially the explanatory approach of this particular analysis. From the perspective of psychoanalytical generational research, I will demonstrate that Welzer, Moller and Tschuggnall only present half the picture of how families deal with the issue of National Socialism. I will base this finding on the perspective of psychoanalytical generational research.

T HE S TUDY “G RANDPA W ASN ’ T

A

N AZI ” –

A

C RITIQUE

Welzer and his colleagues analysed how the national socialist period is remembered in “totally normal” German families (Welzer et al. 2002: 14)1: How do the grandparents and their children and grandchildren talk about this time period? Which stories do the grandparents share about their lives under the Nazi regime and which of these stories are passed on to the following generations? For the study, Welzer and his co-authors interviewed 40 families in the context of a

1

All citations in this article have been translated from the German original into English.

34 | J AHN L OHL

whole family discussion. Subsequently, 142 separate interviews were conducted as a follow-up to the family conversations. In these interviews, the older family members were asked about their experiences during the Nazi period, and the children and grandchildren were asked about what they had heard from their parents and grandparents concerning this time period. During the time period in which this study was conducted (1997-2002), the study of how families were dealing with National Socialism was not a new research topic; at the time, some analyses had already been published on this subject (Bar-On 1989, Rosenthal 1997, Rommelspacher 1995, Schneider et al. 1996). However, what was new about the study by Welzer et al., was that they argued from a memory research perspective. Welzer and his colleagues use the term “family memory” and thus argue against a static perspective of memory: “The most important aspect in this approach is that ‘family memory’ does not consist of a firmly defined and readily retrievable inventory of stories but of a communicative realization of episodes which are related to individual family members and are talked about by the family” (Welzer et al. 2002: 19). From this perspective, family memory is not a set stock of stories but rather a communicative process. By telling each other stories from the past, by listening to them, interrupting each other and contributing to the narrative, the family members transport the past into the present. The family memory is then understood as a way of bringing the past into the present in a communicative process. The core thesis of Welzer et al. is that the past, as it is understood by individual family members, is constructed by this shared commemorative speaking of it: “Family history is generated by talking about it” (Jensen 2004: 23). Welzer et al. understand this communicative way of “generating history” as a social practice which forms a group out of the family members (Jensen 2004): This commemorative speaking serves the purpose of securing cohesion among the family members, in order to maintain identity and to fulfil loyalty obligations. Welzer et al. argue that it does not matter whether the narration is historical reality or family myths. It is only important that the family conversation constructs interpretations of history “with which all family members can live” (Welzer et al. 2002: 10). Family memory is a “living memory where the criteria of truth is defined by group loyalties and identities” (ibid.: 13). Therefore, the family community judges the veracity of the memories based on particular perceptions of the past that make it possible “to maintain the good history of the family and to continue it” (ibid.: 24). The study then examined how the following generations are participating in the construction of a ”good history”. The results showed that the stories told by

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the grandparents are changed as they make their way through the generations, because the listeners (grandchildren, etc.) are re-shaping them. According to Welzer et al., this changing of the grandparents’ stories is successful especially because the stories have a narrative character, which leaves “space for insertions” (ibid.: 35), i.e. there are gaps as well as a generally nebulous quality (ibid.) to the stories: passages which are told in a manner that is not clear, but rather hesitating, evasive or not explicit at all. “Actually, the stories live because of their gaps, which can then be arbitrarily filled” (ibid.: 41). If the listeners succeed in filling the gaps of the stories with their own interpretations and visual images (as they are communicated by the media), and are thus able to remove the nebulous character, they have appropriated the story. According to Welzer et al. the narrative has then been intergenerationally transmitted. However, whenever there is any hint in the grandparents’ stories of personal ”involvement” in guilt and participation as a perpetrator, the grandchildren persistently do not hear it: they construct an image of their grandparents in which they are assigned a role which exonerates them from “crime, ostracism and annihilation” (ibid.: 10). In no case are the grandparents seen as National Socialists, murderous Wehrmacht soldiers or anti-Semites. The descendants utilize, however, each and every “hint of the grandparents having done some ‘good’” in order to continue writing the family’s ‘good history’” (ibid.: 11). The grandchildren’s stories present the grandparents as victims of the war and as heroes of the everyday resistance against an all too powerful system. The stories tell of speaking out, of civil courage and of the active dissent of the grandparents. Welzer et al. provide empirical evidence that it is not the grandparents themselves that are telling these stories, but that these recounts are what the generation of grandchildren make out of their grandparents’ stories. For example, Elli Krug, now 91 years old, shares the following: The Jews were the worst afterwards. They really harassed us ... They sat there and made us serve them, and then they didn’t want ... We had this big hayloft [where] they slept overnight ... The Jews and Russians, I always made sure that I didn’t get them. They were really disgusting, you know? I always stood down the street, in front of the gate, and when they said, ‘Quarters,’ I said, ‘No, everything’s full!’ If the Jews ... came, I said, ‘It’s all full of Russians, you can come in with me!’... And when the Russians came, then I said the same thing, that there were Jews here (Welzer 2005: 10).2

2

Background information: after the end of the war, refugees and displaced persons were travelling in all directions, needing accommodation on the way, and people had to share their homes with them.

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Thus Ms. Krug explains how she was able to avoid helping “Jews” or “Russians” in the post national socialist period by not providing them with shelter. Her description (“the worst”, “disgusting”) does indicate an anti-Semitic attitude which is still quite pronounced. How do her grandchildren hear this story? Her granddaughter Sylvia, who is 26 years old, creates a story out of her grandmother’s narrative, in which her grandmother hid a Jewish prisoner who had escaped: Once she told a story I thought was really interesting: Our village was on the road to Bergen-Belsen, and she hid someone who escaped from one of those transports, in a really interesting way, in some grain box with straw sticking out – she really hid them. Then people came and looked in her farmyard and she kept quiet. That’s a little thing that I really give her a lot of credit for (ibid.: 10).

Why does the granddaughter retell her grandmother’s story in such a way that it sounds as if her grandmother had helped Jews during the Nazi regime when, in fact, her grandmother refused to help Russians and Jews after 1945? How do the researchers in Welzer’s group explain their observations? Welzer argues that the reason why grandchildren try “to construct positive stories about their relatives” is: […] because they know so much about the Nazi period: the knowledge of the atrocities of the past raises the question about what role the grandfather played [...]. And an answer to this question, which does justice to the historical knowledge but at the same time fulfils loyalty obligations […] towards one’s own relatives, consists of positioning grandpa and grandma in history in such a way that no shadow falls on their moral integrity (Welzer 2004: 54).

According to Welzer, family history is therefore altered for two reasons: First, because the grandchildren know so much about National Socialism and the atrocities committed during that period and second, as obedient children, they want to continue perpetuating the family’s good history. In the following paragraphs, these two points will be critically analyzed. The more comprehensive their knowledge about the Holocaust, according to Welzer et al.’s line of reasoning, the more strongly the grandchildren are committed to developing a narrative in which the grandparents are not involved in any of the Nazi crimes, but appear as victims of war and of Nazi terror, or as heroes of the day-to-day resistance: the grandchildren face the challenge of having to integrate their own grandparents into their “extensive knowledge” regarding the national socialist past (Lenz & Welzer 2005: 276). It is not clear how Welzer et al. estab-

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lish whether their knowledge is extensive, good or comprehensive. In one of their study’s endnotes, this assumption is supported by a reference to a study by Silbermann and Stoffers (2000): [Only] 4.3% of all Germans above the age of 14 have no idea what is meant by the word ‘Auschwitz’. 73.7% see the remembrance of Auschwitz as a synonym for national socialist crimes as important, in order to prevent that ‘anything like that’ will ever be repeated and because we owe it to the victims (Welzer et al. 2002: 217).

These numbers can indeed be found in Silbermann and Stoffers’ study. However, their central result and especially their intention is completely misunderstood by Welzer et al. Their usage of this study ends up simplifying the data, leading to the possibility of false interpretation. To explain, based on their results, Silbermann and Stoffers in fact refer to “a growing lack of knowledge” regarding the question as to “who or what Auschwitz is”. Every fifth adolescent that was asked could not answer the question of why Auschwitz is “not […] readily available in their memory” (Silbermann & Stoffers 2000: 43). According to their study, knowledge about national socialist crimes is actually shrinking within a part of the younger generation “to a minimal level” (ibid.: 44). It is furthermore noteworthy, that the adolescents “have heard the name Auschwitz but they don’t know anything about Auschwitz, or not enough, to be able to actually draw upon any associations regarding the past if they just hear the name Auschwitz” (ibid.). The interviewed adolescents could often make a connection between Auschwitz and the term “concentration camp”, but every tenth adolescent that was interviewed was only able to provide an “answer which could be summarized under the terms memorial and museum. If Auschwitz is only a museum within the knowledge horizon of many adolescents, then the gallows turn from an instrument of murder into an exhibit which will be marvelled at with a certain sense of thrill” (ibid.: 45). Therefore, to a significant portion of this generation, the national socialist past is turning into one of history’s finished chapters about which concrete knowledge is increasingly disappearing. Not only Silbermann and Stoffers speak of a growing lack of knowledge about the national socialist past. In their 2002 study, Ahlheim and Heger interviewed students at the University of Essen. They found some enormous knowledge gaps: Only 29% of the students interviewed demonstrated good factual knowledge (as Ahlheim and Heger called it): they knew when the Second World War started and when it ended. They were able – with a generous evaluation criteria – to name at least one victim group in addition to the Jews, and they

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knew what Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Nuremberg Laws meant and what happened in the “Reichskristallnacht” and at the Conference in Wannsee. 59% had only fragmentary knowledge and 17% had only very little factual knowledge, i.e. three quarters of the students interviewed, all of whom could be considered part of the future German educated class, did not have good historical knowledge. Moreover, in his study of historical-cultural socialization in school, ZülsdorfKersting writes that adolescent grandchildren possess an “astonishingly low level” of knowledge after studying National Socialism in school (Zülsdorf-Kersting 2007: 451). None of the adolescents participating in the study was able to tell “the history of the Holocaust in a few coherent sentences” (ibid.). The research results of Silbermann and Stoffers, Ahlheim and Heger, and of ZülsdorfKersting all oppose the assumption made by Welzer et al. of more extensive knowledge. As mentioned above, according to Welzer et al., the re-shaping of family history is also informed by family loyalties. In other words, based on “familial loyalty obligations and personal attachment to the beloved grandfather and grandmother” it is impossible for the grandchildren to link the grandparents “to the horrific scenario of the Nazi regime and their unmeasurable crimes” (Welzer 2004: 51). “The tendency to heroize the grandparents’ generation shows the never-to-be-underestimated strong effects of ties of loyalty to loved ones on historical awareness and on the retrospective construction of the past” (Welzer 2005: 11). The authors argue that the positive emotional experiences the following generations have with the older generation in their families are retroactively extended to the “entire biography of the loved one”, including the time period before the grandchildren were born (ibid.). The re-forming of stories heard, on the basis of loyalty and love, “turn grandparents into people of constant moral integrity, according to today’s standards and normative appraisal” (Welzer 2005: 7). Seen from this perspective, the construction of a “good history” is not about a cognitive localization of stories within a supposedly copious historical knowledge base, it is rather about their moral and emotional categorization: before even dealing with the grandparents’ story, individuals have been provided with an idea of the “moral nature of ancestors” which goes back to the primary socialization period and which even structures the way the story is heard in the first place (ibid.: 24). According to Welzer et al., it is the loyalty and attachment that are connected to this idea and/or to the affect of love which leads to the grandchildren seemingly having no open moral questions regarding their family history and not perceiving their own forefathers as historical actors in the national socialist Volksgemeinschaft. Without a doubt, it is peculiar that the origin of this loyalty and attachment is neither examined

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further by Welzer et al., nor is it discussed beyond the casually mentioned platitude that “ties of family loyalty” are created “through socialization and time spent together” (Welzer 2005: 7). The development of emotional relationships between family members is also not discussed in any more depth. This is especially conspicuous because emotional relationships are, in particular, considered to be a central issue for any tradition transmission processes, “It is demonstrated here again, that in the process of intergenerational transmission of the past the emotional dimension of transmission and the visual imagination play a larger role than knowledge that is cognitively represented” (ibid.: 200). It is a result of their research perspective that Welzer et al. do not further pursue the development of familial loyalties and attachments and emotional relationships between family members. In their work, they do not integrate generational research with a psycho-analytical orientation, although doing so would make it possible to study the development of familial loyalties and attachments and their emotional dynamics more closely. In regard to the analyses by, e.g. Bar-On, Rosenthal or Schneider et al., Welzer et al. only mention that these authors looked exclusively for “depth psychological layers of meaning” which might be buried in the “interviews and family conversations (…). In other words, we are less interested in what people do not say but rather in what they do say and what is effected between the generations by what was said” (ibid., 2002: 15). How is this to be assessed? First of all, the assumption that psychoanalytically oriented generational research is only focused on what is not being said is an easily refuted misinterpretation. To explain, Welzer et al. overlook that the authors of the studies they mentioned understand speaking and silence as interrelated and inseparable. Thus the silence is understood not only as not-speaking by, e.g., Schneider et al., but as “part of a communicational context which generally allows omissions, but in the specifically German case this context is constituted by omission” (1996: 198). Bar-On’s research results are not even mentioned, although they have been repeatedly confirmed since the end of the 1980s. They demonstrate that it is, in particular, the stories that are not told that are much more potent for intergenerational transmission than the stories that have been told (Bar-On 1989:21; Bar-On & Gilad 1992:20; Rosenthal 1997: 22 and Rosenthal 2000: 4). From this perspective, the theory of communicative intergenerational transmission of the past which is presented by Welzer et al. remains at a virtually extracted level – the manufacturing of family conversations. This theory does not get to the deep structure of intergenerational processes and stays on the level of manifest. However, Welzer et al. speak of an emotional dimension of intergenerational trans-

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mission within families, of loyalty and attachments and the love of the grandchildren to their grandparents, but they don’t justify this terminology. This justification is especially urgent when these aspects are discussed as a motive for the re-forming of family history. The family memory researchers describe the narrative level of family conversation with an impressive exactness and show how the stories told by the grandparents change on their paths through the generations. The explanation that this re-forming of stories is caused by positive emotional relationships and family loyalties between the family members, is, however, not systematically understood nor is it dealt with more extensively. In my opinion, this only shows half of the picture of how families deal with the national socialist past. This contention is further supported by the fact that Welzer et al. do not see the role played by familial conflicts and ambivalent attitudes when individuals are dealing with the national socialist past. This is not a result of the selection of families questioned – as Plato supposed – but is rather caused by the data collection method in the form of interviews and family discussions (2001: 65). In a preliminary study used to test their research method, Welzer, Montau and Plaß write: The “relatives of the non-Jewish contemporary witness generation [are] for us […] not uninvolved witnesses of what was happening, but potential followers and accomplices […]. It is precisely this kind of thinking that has to remain unsaid in conversations between the generations, if one does not want to offend the sensibilities of the persons interviewed” (1997:19). Welzer et al. know that, through this procedure, they reproduce “exactly those […] taboos” that shape the familial communication on National Socialism (ibid.). This danger of scientifically repeating familial defence mechanisms is not only not reflected upon methodologically, but it remains unaddressed in the follow-up study, “Grandpa wasn’t a Nazi”. This lack of discussion of the emotional dimension of the process of intergenerational transmission, with all its ambivalences, conflicts, and loyalties when dealing with family history, is problematic. To outline this problem further, I will focus on the development of familial loyalties and emotional dynamics from the perspective of psychoanalytical generational research.

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According to Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, whose approach I have addressed in more detail in other work (Lohl 2010), after 1945, many perpetrators, followers and spectators removed their “excitement for the Third Reich”, their “idealization of the Führer and his teachings” along with those memories involving “directly criminal acts” from their consciousness (Mitscherlich, A. and M. 1967: 33). The result of this turning away from one’s own affective integration into the national socialist Volksgemeinschaft is a “conspicuous absence of emotion in response to reports of mountains of dead bodies in concentration camps, […] news about millions of Jews, Polish people and Russians having been murdered, or information on the murder of political enemies from their own ranks” (ibid.: 42 et seq.). This emotional numbness demonstrates a defence against any emotional involvement in the events of the national socialist period. Thus former Nazis evade feelings of guilt, shame, depression and a sense of inferiority; in doing so, they are derealising the past. The past then is not a part of one’s own identity, but something foreign which has nothing to do with one’s own life history during the Nazi period. The past is presented in such a way, that the perspective is that “one had to sacrifice a lot, had to endure the war and after that one was discriminated against. Still, one was innocent because all the things that one was accused of were ordered by one’s superiors. This amplifies the perception that one was the victim of evil forces: at first it was the evil Jews, then the evil Nazis, and finally the evil Russians. In each case evil is externalized; it is looked for on the outside and comes from the outside” (ibid.: 61). This defence mechanism for dealing with the national socialist past is not only found in secondary anti-Semitism and in a form of emotional anti-communism seen in the West German post national socialist society. It is also practised in this way in many former National Socialists’ families. The microcosm of the family became the preferred location for the rejection of the need to examine one’s own personal emotional integration into National Socialism. In this environment, the relationship to one’s own children opened up an opportunity to stabilize an approach to dealing with history that is characterized by a rejection of guilt. In the decades after National Socialism, “the illusion of being the chosen race and the mentality that goes with that, along with ideas concerning solutions for social conflicts through segregation and annihilation […] had not vanished from people’s minds. However, these ideas’ object of projection, i.e. the ideologically defined “subhumans” (Untermenschen), who were the target upon which everything weak and bad could be unloaded, was missing. The dynamics of ide-

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alization and hatred and debasement were running riot within the families […]. The relationships within the families were now often shaped by the parents projecting the denied parts of their selves onto their children. The parents projected their own weak and ‘bad’ sides, that they had defended in a delusion of strength, onto their own children. In this way, they abused their children in order to bring stability to their own inner balance” (Bohleber 1990: 78 et seq.). Projection is a defence mechanism which allows a person to not perceive insufferable and unacceptable parts of one’s self, such as feelings of guilt and inferiority, fear, rage and hatred, etc., as aspects which belong to one’s own person. They are then assigned to other individuals. Bohleber’s thesis is that, in many former National Socialists’ families in the decades after 1945, feelings of guilt, shame and grief which the parents did not want to have to feel when dealing with their own history and which they wanted to hide from themselves, were projected onto their own children. Unconsciously, in the eyes of the parents, their children personify precisely those aspects of their own history which they do not want to perceive as part of their own person and biography: feelings of guilt and shame, possible doubts, diminutiveness and weakness are experienced as something that has to do primarily with the child and its behaviour, and not with one’s own history of emotional integration into National Socialism. With this kind of projection, the parents are beginning to non-verbally communicate, “structured […] demands and expectations to the child, long before these […] can be consciously perceived” (Müller-Hohagen 2001: 84). What does this dynamic mean for the relationship between parent and child? Based on this kind of projection, the parents have a certain sense of distrust towards their children: The reason for that is that the children may, according to the parents’ perception, touch upon their narcissistic wounds: “Without being aware of it, they confront their parents with the parts that they had split off from the rest of their biography” – especially with feelings of guilt (Hardtmann 1989: 238). When this occurs, the parents often react with aggression. For instance, later generations often experience that older relatives feel easily provoked by questions about the past and that they do not only react with silence but with violence or a threat of violence. Rommelspacher reports, for example, on one family in which the children were “kicked under the table” when they were disturbing the supposed peace in the family. At some point – as one of the daughters reported – “just a certain kind of look” sufficed to force her into loyalty (1995: 93). The parental projection and the attempt to control what they project through the way in which they raise their children are tantamount to a narcissistic functionalisation of the children: in the parents’ projected perception, the child al-

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ways represents their own non-ego and denied aspects of self; this regulates the emotional relationship with the child. The child insofar as it is loved is – so to speak – “pocketed as a part of the parental ego […] while the ‘rest’ ends up in a state of non-ego. This part becomes the embodiment of all that the parents hate in themselves and therefore in their child” (Schneider et al. 1996: 323). Accordingly, love and hatred towards the child gain their special quality uniquely from the psychic usurpation of the child. This can only be understood in the context of how the parents deal emotionally with the national socialist parts of their life history. The children are not “loved” for who they are, but only under the condition that they integrate themselves into the parental process of dealing with their past. The children are “hated” and become the prospective object of parental violence. This is because, in the parents’ unconscious, the child represents the denied parts of their own personality which they experience in their dealing with their history as insufferable and unacceptable. In order to avoid having this aggression and this hatred turned against their own person, and in order to gain the love and affection of the parents, many children develop a loyalty obligation to the defensive mechanisms that their parents developed in their own dealing with their history. The children are positioning themselves vis-à-vis their parents in such a way that their person does not turn into the embodiment of what the parents project and hate. It is in this way that a lot of children of perpetrators and followers develop “an own ‘inner sense’ for the parental defence mechanisms” (Buchholz 1998: 330). The children intuit how they have to behave when dealing with the past so as not to provoke the parents and in order to avoid familial conflicts and aggression. This emotional intuition is at the core of familial loyalty and has to be created all the more desperately and comprehensively, the more the feeling of belonging to the parents is at stake, i.e. under a severe, unconscious threat of consequences for any form of insubordination. Loyalty obligations in “totally normal German families” are – when looked at from this perspective – not primarily connected to love as is the assumption of Welzer et al. but to parental aggression and force used against the children. Müller-Hohagen chooses the term “violence-induced loyalty” for this phenomenon. Incidentally, this loyalty is not only formed “via direct practices of violence [...] but via many other means, e.g. a certain aloofness with a threatening undertone” towards any interest the children express in the history of their family (Müller-Hohagen 2001: 99). This use of force and aggression does not just roll off of these children. Rather, they are integrated into the super-ego, in which “destructively sadistic identifications with their own parents” are dominant (Bohleber 1997: 979). In case of a breach of this familial loyalty, the children’s auto-aggressive affects are mobilized and are experienced in the form of feelings of guilt: If the child deviates

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from its own intuition concerning approaches to the family history, which is characterized by defensiveness against guilt, the child develops her/his own feelings of guilt, which actually stem from the parents’ history. In this way, it is the children that experience the parents’ guilt by transforming it into their own feelings of guilt. With this as a background, it becomes understandable why children and adolescents in the “postwar period did not at all or did not often ask their parents the questions ‘What did you do during the Nazi period?’ ‘Did you do anything about which you should feel guilty?’ […] Thus the parents were not perceived as guilty perpetrators but as innocent victims of war, imprisonment and destruction” (Schneider 2001: 327). On the basis of their own emotional intuition concerning the parental defence mechanisms, the children learned to see their parents not with their own eyes but with their parents’ eyes. In many cases, they perceived them as people that suffered through National Socialism and war and that did not have anything to do with the national socialist crimes and their victims. Motivated by these aggressively induced loyalty obligations, they hold on to this falsified memory of the family history. Therefore, even the question regarding any possible shared guilt on the part of the parents or regarding any possible (emotional) participation in the ostracism, denunciation, pillaging, prosecution, deportation and annihilation of national socialist victims will not become part of their historical consciousness. Systemic family research has already conceptualized the difficulties involved in trying to keep the emotional connection to one’s own children free of loyalty obligations to one’s own parents (Boszormenyi-Nagy & Spark 1973). Indeed, once the children of National Socialists become parents themselves, these familial loyalties do not dissolve automatically, as Rosenthal (1997) or Schneider, Stillke and Leineweber (1996) have demonstrated: parents protect their own parents if their children ask about their grandparents’ history.3 Therefore, due to their parents’ behaviour, even the grandchildren of national socialist perpetrators and followers are bound to the loyalties that dictate how the family has to deal with the family history. Nevertheless, not everything remains the same. Ebrecht demonstrates that parents “create an ego ideal for themselves with the idea of the ‘younger generation’” (1998: 27): the grandchildren have to vicariously free the parents from those feelings of guilt which are psychically structuring their loyalty obligations. Unconsciously, parents demand that their children provide them with a moral

3

Compare Brendler 1997: 95, Rosenthal 2000: 7, Bar-On 1989:22, Ahlheim & Heger 2002: 70 et seq.

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orientation for their handling of the family history. They wish that their own children, as grandchildren, would vicariously produce a less conflict-laden relationship with their grandparents and their past. The parents would like the familial space, which in their own childhood was dominated by aggression, conflicts and silence, to be one characterized by communicative rationality. According to Ebrecht, the parents unconsciously assign this desire to their children – the grandchildren in the family. The children internalize it. Through the unconscious identification with this assignment, the grandchildren are then psychically bound to the emotional dynamic, which has its origin not simply in the emotional relationship between the relatives of the previous two generations, but specifically in the grandparents’ handling of their life stories. The Mitscherlichs subsume this dynamic with “the evil is outside”. This unconscious assignment turns into an aggressive component of the grandchildren’s super-ego (Kestenberg 1989: 172). Do the grandchildren try working towards a conflict-free relationship with their grandparents, in order to avoid feelings of guilt not only in themselves, but also in their parents and grandparents? The psychologist and political scientist Connie Schneider (2004: 288 et seq.) shows that many grandchildren only seem to talk with their grandparents about National Socialism in a more conflict-free manner. During these conversations, they might dig around in the family history, but they don’t want to hear stories about participation in or knowledge about national socialist crimes. They are primarily interested in a positive emotional continuity between their grandparents’, their parents’ and their own generation – in order to fulfil the unconscious assignment given to them by their parents. With this as a backdrop, it becomes clear that the following statement by Grünberg does not only apply to the children, but also to the grandchildren of national socialist perpetrators and followers: “They often do not know how their forefathers acted during the time of National Socialism; in the majority, they do not know […] who they really love as father, mother, grandparents, as uncle or aunt” (1997: 17).

C LOSING W ORDS : P SYCHOLOGY

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Welzer et al. only show half the picture of how German families deal with the national socialist period: they barely focus on the emotional dynamics of intergenerational transmission, while putting too much emphasis on what is verbalised. It remains unacknowledged that the relationship between generations constitutes a power-relationship which forces the younger ones into being loyal to the older generation. In order to fulfil its protective function for the older genera-

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tion, this loyalty must not be separate from the younger generation’s own personal convictions, and therefore has to rely on unconscious identification. Welzer and his co-authors disregard the whole array of psychoanalytical studies on family dynamics and intergenerational transmission that introduced the following hypothesis: The intergenerational creation of familial loyalties is not connected primarily to love, but is associated with force and aggression. For Welzer et al., the purgation of the inner-familial space of memories of having been a perpetrator and the associated guilt is not to be “only negatively” evaluated. The invention of grandparents that were involved in acts of resistance would at least show that “in a totalitarian system, individual resistance was possible and reasonable”. Therefore, the family story in its altered version may “independent of its truth content, provide a motivating example for one’s own courageous behaviour in case of threats against and persecution of people that are close” (Welzer et al. 2002: 78, see Weilnböck 2005: 174 and Weilnböck 2008: 11). On the one hand, Welzer et al. attribute a political-pedagogical surplus value to the construction of family myths. On the other hand, Welzer sees a problem in the grandchildren’s presumably well-developed historical knowledge: it “can be said that the education on the ‘Third Reich’ and the Holocaust has reached a critical level – more information is not necessary and it potentially generates even counter-productive effects” (2001: 7). What are these effects? One paragraph later he argues, “In their way, adolescents from the extreme right could interpret the flood of information as a call for action, and a visit to any of the concentration camp memorials as instruction for how – in their perspective – one ought to deal with people that think or look differently” (ibid.). According to Welzer, it is a fact that family myths motivate courageous behaviour against right-wing exclusion while historical education – by Welzer understood in a truncated form as providing information – abets right-wing extremism. It can therefore be stated that, for Welzer, from a political perspective, more historically enlightening information on the Holocaust is not necessary. At the same time, he grants positive political effects to a family history that is falsified. Welzer’s perspective on the political effects of family myths is based on scientifically untenable assumptions: First, there is evidence of an astonishing low level of historical knowledge among the younger generation. Second, recent studies show that the purgation of the inner-familial space of memories of having been a perpetrator and the associated guilt are an important factor of political socialization in far-right groups (Inowlocki 2000, Köttig 2006, Lohl 2010).

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R EFERENCES Ahlheim, Klaus & Bardo Heger (2002): Die unbequeme Vergangenheit. NSVergangenheit, Holocaust und die Schwierigkeiten des Erinnerns. Schwalbach/Ts.: Wochenschau-Verlag. Assmann, Aleida (2007): Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. München: Beck. Bar-On, Dan (1989): Die Last des Schweigens. Gespräche mit Kindern von Nazi-Tätern. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Bar-On, Dan & Noga Gilad (1992): Auswirkungen des Holocausts auf drei Generationen. Psychosozial 15(3): 7-21. Bohleber, Werner (1997): Trauma, Identifizierung und historischer Kontext. Über die Notwendigkeit, die NS-Vergangenheit in den psychoanalytischen Deutungsprozess einzubeziehen. Psyche 51 (9-10): 958-995. – (1990): Das Fortwirken des Nationalsozialismus in der zweiten und dritten Generation nach Auschwitz. Babylon 6(7): 70-83. Boszormenyi-Nagy, Ivan & Geraldine M. Spark (1973): Unsichtbare Bindungen. Die Dynamik familiärer Systeme. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Buchholz, Michael B. (1998): Die unbewusste Weitergabe zwischen den Generationen. Psychoanalytische Beobachtungen. In: Rüsen, Jörn & Jürgen Straub (Hg.): Die dunkle Spur der Vergangenheit. Psychoanalytische Zugänge zum Geschichtsbewusstsein. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp; pp. 330-353. Grünberg, Kurt (1997): Schweigen und Ver-Schweigen. NS-Vergangenheit in Familien von Opfern und von Tätern oder Mitläufern. Psychosozial 20 (2): 9-22. Hardtmann, Gertrud (1989): Spuren des Nationalsozialismus bei nicht-jüdischen Kindern, Jugendlichen und ihren Familien. In: Cogoy, Renate et al. (Hg.): Erinnerung einer Profession. Erziehungsberatung, Jugendhilfe und Nationalsozialismus. Münster: Votum; pp. 231-240. Inowlocki, Lena (2000): Sich in die Geschichte hineinreden. Biographische Fallanalysen rechtsextremer Gruppenzugehörigkeit. Frankfurt/M.: Cooperative. Jensen, Olaf (2004): Geschichte machen. Strukturmerkmale des intergenerationellen Sprechens über die NS-Vergangenheit in deutschen Familien. Tübingen: Edition Diskord. Kestenberg, Judith (1989): Neue Gedanken zur Transposition. Klinische, therapeutische und entwicklungsbedingte Betrachtungen. Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse 24: 163-189.

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Köttig, Michaela (2006): Lebensgeschichten rechtsextrem orientierter Mädchen und junger Frauen. Biographische Verläufe im Kontext der Familien- und Gruppendynamik. Gießen: Psychosozial. Lenz, Claudia & Harald Welzer (2005): Zweiter Weltkrieg, Holocaust und Kollaboration im europäischen Gedächtnis. Ein Werkstattbericht aus einer vergleichenden Studie zur Tradierung von Geschichtsbewusstsein. Handlung Kultur Interpretation 14(1): 275-295. Lohl, Jan (2010): Gefühlserbschaft und Rechtsextremismus. Eine sozial-psychologische Studie zur Generationengeschichte des Nationalsozialismus. Gießen: Psychosozial. Mitscherlich, Alexander & Margarethe Mitscherlich (1967): Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern. Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens. In: Mitscherlich, Alexander: Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 4. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Müller-Hohagen, Jürgen (2001): Seelische Weiterwirkungen aus der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus. Zum Widerstreit der Loyalitäten. In: Grünberg, Kurt & Jürgen Straub (Hg.): Unverlierbare Zeit. Psychosoziale Spätfolgen des Nationalsozialismus bei Nachkommen von Opfern und Tätern. Tübingen: Edition Diskord; pp. 83-118. Plato, Alexander von (2001): Wo sind die ungläubigen Kinder geblieben? Kritik einiger Thesen des Projektes “Tradierung von Geschichtsbewusstsein”. Werkstatt Geschichte 30: 64-68. Rosenthal, Gabriele (2000): Die Nachwirkungen der Nazi-Verbrechen bei den Nachkommen von Nazi-Tätern und bei Nachkommen von Überlebenden der Shoah. http://www.qualitative-sozialforschung.de/rosenthal.htm at 11.09.03. – (1997): Der Holocaust im Leben von drei Generationen. Familien von Überlebenden der Shoah und von Nazi-Tätern. Gießen: Psychosozial. Schneider, Christian (2001): Erbschaft der Schuld? Der Diskurs über die NSVergangenheit in den deutschen Nachkriegsgenerationen. In: Lappin, Eleonora & Bernhard Schneider (Hg.): Die Lebendigkeit der Geschichte. (Dis-)Kontinuitäten in Diskursen über den Nationalsozialismus. St. Ingbert: Röhrig; pp. 324-335. Schneider, Christian, Cordelia Stillke & Bernd Leineweber (1996): Das Erbe der Napola. Versuch einer Generationengeschichte des Nationalsozialismus. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition. Schneider, Connie (2004): Abschied von der Vergangenheit? Umgangsweisen mit der nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit in der dritten Generation in Ost- und Westdeutschland. München: Maibauer. Silbermann, Alphons & Manfred Stoffers (2000): Auschwitz: Nie davon gehört? Erinnern und Vergessen in Deutschland. Berlin: Rowohlt.

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Weilnböck, Harald (2008): “The Trauma Must Remain Inaccessible to Memory”. Trauma, Melancholia and Other (Ab-)uses of Trauma Concepts in Literary Theory. Part II. Source: http://www.eurozine.com/pdf/2008-03-26weilnbock-en.pdf on 13. June 2011. – (2005): Zur dissoziativen Intellektualität in der Nachkriegszeit. Historischpsychotraumatologische Überlegungen zu Metapher/Metonymie und Assoziation/Dissoziation bei kritischen, neukonservativen und postmodernen Autoren. In: Seidler, Günther H. & Wolfgang U. Eckart (Hg.): Verletzte Seelen. Möglichkeiten und Perspektiven einer historischen Traumaforschung. Gießen: Psychosozial. Welzer, Harald (2005): Grandpa Wasn’t a Nazi. The Holocaust in German Family Remembrance. Source: http://www.ajc.org/atf/cf/%7B42D75369-D5824380-8395-D25925B85EAF%7D/Grandpa_wasnt_nazi.pdf, last viewed on 9. June 2011. – (2004): “Ach Opa!“. Einige Bemerkungen zum Verhältnis von Tradierung und Aufklärung. In: Meseth, Wolfgang et al. (Hg.): Schule und Nationalsozialismus. Anspruch und Grenzen des Geschichtsunterrichts. Frankfurt/M.: Campus; pp. 49-64. – (2001): “Bei uns waren sie immer dagegen“. Wie im Familiengespräch aus Zuschauern und Tätern Helden des alltäglichen Widerstandes wurden. Frankfurter Rundschau (06.01.2001): 7. Welzer, Harald, Sabine Moller & Karoline Tschuggnall (2002): “Opa war kein Nazi“. Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis. Frankfurt/M: Fischer. Welzer, Harald, Robert Montau & Christine Plaß (1997): “Was wir für böse Menschen sind!“. Der Nationalsozialismus im Gespräch zwischen den Generationen. Tübingen: Edition Diskord. Zülsdorf-Kersting, Maik (2007): Sechzig Jahre danach, Jugendliche und Holocaust: Eine Studie zur geschichtskulturellen Sozialisation, Münster: Lit.

The Aftermath of Violence The Post-Coup Second Generation in Chile D ANIELA J ARA

Between the years 1970 and 1973, a dramatic process of social polarization deeply divided Chilean society. During the government of Unidad Popular1, the president Salvador Allende attempted to turn Chile into a socialist state through an agenda of nationalization, statization and land reform. His program of radical transformations was strongly opposed by local elites, resulting in the September 11th military coup. As a result and during the bombing of El Palacio de la Moneda (the government palace), the overthrown socialist president committed suicide and a seventeen year-long military dictatorship ensued. These events initiated a long process of dissidence and resistance within Chilean society and trigger dramatically divided memories even today. For some, the following two decades consisted of social order and economic progress, while for others these were years of arbitrary detentions, assassinations, persecutions, isolation and exile.2 For the former, the coup was celebrated as a “salvation”; for the latter it was mourned as one of the worst traumas in Chilean history (Stern 2006 a).

1

Unidad Popular (Popular Unity), consisted of a leftist coalition of political parties

2

The Rettig report (officially the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation)

supporting the socialist president Salvador Allende between 1970 and 1973. stated in 1991 that there were about 3,000 proved cases of death or disappearance. The Valech report (officially: The National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture Report) stated in 2004 that at least 28,000 people were imprisoned and tortured. These numbers are official statistics, and according to Stern, are lower-end figures: “Even using a conservative methodology, a reasonable estimated toll for deaths and disappearances by state agents is 3-500-4,500, for political detentions

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Today, forty years after the September 11th military coup, the politics of state violence that followed have been widely reconstructed in the social memory: documentaries, films, testimonies, parks and museums have memorialised the traumatic events creating narratives, iconographies and aesthetics of the past. However, the passing on of the experience of state violence to the second generation has scarcely been addressed; it has instead been overshadowed by the compelling traumas of the first generation and their testimony. Although suffering and state terror have gained recognition in the social imaginary through the passing of time, their causes and effects have been circumscribed to the dictatorial period. It is in this context that looking at the transference of fear along with the experience of state violence in the post-coup second generation provides insight into the aftermath of state violence and its unresolved current presence. Focusing on the so-called “Children of Pinochet” (Contardo & Valenzuela 1991), who were born and grew up within families who suffered state violence in the Chile of the 1970s3 – a decade of violence, distrust and fear (Corradi, Weiss & Garretón 1992) – I aim to show how the traumatic past has, for them, developed into a haunting memory. In the first section I will briefly introduce the reader to 1973, when the September 11th events took place and describe the decade of fear and violence that followed: the setting upon which the early memories of the post-coup second generation were built. In the second section, in order to frame my work in a research field, I will bring into the discussion some research done on the aftermath of the Holocaust, where the second generation concept has been used. Based on ethnographic observations4 of people who grew up in families who suffered symbolical or physical violence under the military regime in Chile, I will describe some of the characteristics of the post-coup second generation’s relation to the traumatic past, which is rooted in memories that were in part experienced and narrated by “others” who vary in their proximity (ranging from parents to textbooks) and in part correspond to their own remembrance of childhood. I will then present the stories of three interviewees (David, Ruth and Gabriel) who have coped with their family memories of state violence. I will pay attention to the different elements that constitute the aftermath of violence embodied in the post-coup second generation: the present wrestling with a painful past, their identification with their

150,000-200,000. Some credible torture estimates surpass the 100,000 threshold, some credible exile estimates reach 400,000” (Stern 2006: XXI) 3

In this article, I will refer to this specific group as the “post -coup second generation”.

4

I did my fieldwork in Chile during the years 2009 and 2010. I interviewed fifty children of the opponents to the dictatorship and conducted four focus groups.

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parent’s suffering, the learned fear of speaking, the different uses of silence within families and the difficult task of coming to terms with haunting memories. Through these cases I will show how silence and speaking were interwoven as strategies to navigate through the regime of fear that was Pinochet’s dictatorship. I will give special attention to David, who has experienced an insightful process in analysing how his father’s traumatic experience still haunts him. Finally, in an effort to frame memory-transmission beyond a narrative perspective, through Gabriel’s life story I will raise questions about the role of the body in the intergenerational passing on of memories.

C ONTEXTUALIZATION : THE C ULTURE OF F EAR IN P INOCHET ’ S C HILE AND THE M ETAPHOR OF THE “E NCAPUCHADO ” After the military coup, and suspending both the constitution and the congress, a Military Junta was established to rule Chile. The Junta campaign could be classically defined as state terrorism. Arbitrary detentions, mass assassinations, mutilation and disappearances were all part of the aggressive first period of the military dictatorship (Stern 2006b; Contardo & Valenzuela 1991; Verdugo 1999). Taming and disciplining were the Junta’s main goal, while physical abuse was one of their primary strategies. As Gómez-Barris states: “Torture was a means to isolate and break down collective identities, induce pain as a fear tactic (one that had reverberations in the wider social sphere) and produced traumatic rupture in victims” (2009: 77). The objective was to disarticulate any manifestation of social resistance against the new regime. Detentions, denouncements, kidnappings and unfair dismissals could happen at any time. Distrust, vigilance and fear were the dominant everyday emotions of opponents to the dictatorship. Carmen Luz Parot’s film Estadio Nacional (2002) – a documentary about a site of torture during the Military Junta – brings up the metaphor of the encapuchado (hooded man), which fully represents the institutionalization of fear and distrust within social relationships during the regime. Therein ex-prisoners talk about their experience in the concentration camp, on the edge of the culture of fear. They describe how the military would choose a politically active prisoner who would be hooded, then tied to a rope, dragged along and forced to recognize his comrades amongst the prisoners. If someone was recognized by the encapuchado, they would be the subject of torture, and possibly shot dead. Turned into an informer, the encapuchado was deprived of his moral nature and reduced to choose between different deaths.

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The metaphor of the hooded man offers a key to the mechanisms of the culture of fear. For the other prisoners, he symbolized the transformation of the public arena in Chile: no one in the camp wanted to look into the encapuchado’s eyes. Similarly, outside the concentration camp, all social intercourse became potentially dangerous and distrust permeated all spheres of everyday life. The encapuchado represents how in such authoritarian contexts the body and the state are linked by fear, somehow reducing the individual’s aims and aspirations to mere survival. The body becomes endangered and everyday life becomes exclusively about finding ways to avoid punishment. This awareness of being in danger and feeling vulnerable took control of many of the potential victims and their children during the military regime. Fear was conspicuous and was experienced through vulnerability, humiliation, animalization and trauma – all leaving traces that still haunt Chile.

T HE P ASSING O N OF S TATE V IOLENCE TO THE P OST -C OUP S ECOND G ENERATION IN C HILE In a completely different context from the post-coup Chile, Holocaust scholars have greatly contributed to the memory field by looking at the effects that the Holocaust has had on the following generations. 5 Influenced by psychoanalysis, scholars have been prolific in reporting different mechanisms of memory transmission within families. In this context, the Holocaust second generation has been conceived as a generation of absence, who have in common growing up with the reference to a traumatic event fundamental to their parent’s biography, but that they themselves did not experience. For some, it is “the wall generation”, meaning that they are separated from their parents by the impossibility of experiencing the event (Grimwood 2007). Marianne Hirsch draws attention to the fact that everything the Holocaust second generation knows about the traumatic event itself is mediated by photographs, stories and silences. She calls this phenomenon “post-memory”, which “…describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences that they ‘remember’ only by means of stories, images and behaviours among which they grew up. But these

5

Though it is a completely different context and I do not intend to establish any comparisons, I quote the Holocaust field here as a paradigmatic – thus relevant – case in post-violence and trauma studies.

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memories were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right”6. Although in a different context, the September 11th events in 1973 Chile provoked a similar phenomenon of transmission. The painful memories and personal experiences of state violence were passed on to the post-coup Chilean second generation despite their being mediated, repressed, silenced or displaced as a taboo subject during Pinochet’s regime. During my fieldwork, I found that when asked about September 1973 the second generation interviewees referred to it as a landmark in their biographies, even though most of them were not even born yet. In order to reconstruct the impact the coup had on their families, they have had to ask other people (usually close relatives) about the chain of events; search official sources (school textbooks, newspapers, archives, documentaries, etc.) and contrast them with their own childhood memories. Personal memories have been the product of a recollection practice, similar to a collage. However, despite its biographical significance, the assemblage of state violence and their family story is not usually part of their “tellable” biography. The events related to the coup can only be told to certain people, and only in specific contexts. Perhaps they are too sad to remember, or the fears attached to the telling of that memory still remain. September 11th is not just a day for the second generation, but a foundational event in their life stories. In the documentary El Eco de las Canciones (2010), the director Antonia Rossi – born to exile parents in the 70s – uses images of tornadoes and atomic bombs as repetitive metaphors of her experience. The documentary exposes her feelings of being trapped in a chain of events over which she had no power but which had an extreme, never ending and determinant impact on her life. The “echo” metaphor is an enlightening image of the second generation’s experience: it refers to the aftermath and the sequence of repercussions that a single event had on people’s lives, turning that one event into an everlasting one. In this way, the second generation as an analytical concept challenges traditional understandings of the impact that state violence has on people’s lives: the echo of violence persists among many of them, they are still dealing with it, violence still haunts them. Such struggles with the past have been referred to as “the afterlife of violence” by Gomez Barris: “the continuing and persistent symbolic and material effects of the original event of violence on people’s daily life, their social and psychic identities and their ongoing wrestling with the past in the present” (2010: 6).

6

Hirsch 2008: 106-107.

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In the following section, I present three cases in which different aspects of being part of the post-coup Chilean second generation are highlighted. David’s ghost David is in his mid-thirties and works as a psychologist. He is the child of a charismatic Unidad Popular (UP) adherent and trade union leader who, after enduring humiliation by the military regime’s secret police and living in fear, got involved in an armed struggle against the dictatorship, eventually dying in exile. After years of therapy, David learned to talk about his family story. But when he talks about these traumatic events, he speaks in the present tense. By speaking in this way, David made me aware of how present the past is for him; listening to him became a clue to understanding the aftermath of traumatic events amongst the second generation and its haunting presence. Now that I have started speaking about it, I am suddenly struck with the feeling of “watch your words”. I automatically reply to myself: hey, don’t be silly, look where you are. Forty years after the military coup, David is still struggling with the violence suffered by his father. Although his father is already dead and the dictatorship ended around twenty years ago, David noticed the shadows of old fears when we first met for our interview. Our conversation took place decades after the dictatorship, but immediately David’s ghosts turned on a warning. It was as if the events were still happening in the process of him coming to terms with his own story. When asked about this feeling, David associated it with one of his recurrent fears as a child of an opponent to the dictatorship. Having internalized the pragmatic survival instinct developed during the culture of fear, he knew that if someone had heard him talking about the political identity of his family, “they could send his father to jail”. Avery Gordon has described these haunting memories as the ghostly in the social life: “If haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place. The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life” (1997: 8). Though David was aware of his fear, he was courageous enough to tell me – a stranger – his personal and family story. Perhaps he did so because he was able to recognize it and interpret it, rather than just react to it. Let’s return to David’s memories:

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So, as soon as the coup comes, my father is fired from the bank (…). So, what my mother tells me, and my father also told me later, is that when my father woke up that day he realized that the coup was taking place. He says goodbye to my mother and attempts to arm himself, running from the police because there was a curfew (…) The moral of the story is that if the weapons had arrived [if David’s father had gotten a hold of them], I would not have had a father. He would have gone out to fight and I believe that he would have been killed, or a civil war would have taken place… Then he came back home and fell into a deep depression, because apart from being fired, he was being persecuted.7 For David, the present is woven around traumatic episodes that were not endured by him but by his father. After the coup, his father was dismissed from his job, their home was raided several times by the secret police and his family had to live clandestinely for months. Blacklisted and impeded from finding a new job, David’s father bought a taxi. Soon after, he fell into a deep depression, the first of several depressions that would profoundly mark David’s life. In 1974 he picks up a passenger in his taxi, who says, “Let’s go to Playa Ancha” [a coastal locality in Valparaíso, over an hour away from Santiago] (…) When they were far away, the guy takes a gun, he puts it to my father’s head, and he says, “Stop here, motherfucker”. Suddenly, two other cars surround them, they move him to another car, and say, “You are a dead man”. It was the CNI8 (…) “There is no way out”, my father thinks to himself, so he asks them for the chance to speak. “No” they say. “Please, it is only a word”. “No, no, no, no”. Finally they said, “Hey motherfucker, what do you want to say?”. And my father says, “I know maybe I talk too much [against the dictatorship] at the taxi stop, but it doesn’t mean anything. I have children, and I struggle everyday to work”. And the motherfuckers reply, “Yes, we know that your wife is called Tatiana, and that you have three children, we know where you live…We know everything about you”. (…) Then they are silent, they stop the car, one of them stays inside, and the other guys start to discuss.

7

The day of the coup, some of the adherents to the UP made an attempt to defend the government of Salvador Allende. They were quickly defeated.

8

In the interview, David referred to the CNI (Central Nacional de Informaciones; National Information Centre). However he meant DINA (Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia; National Intelligence Directorate), which was formed immediately after the coup to coordinate the activities of the military intelligence services. From the beginning on, the DINA functioned as a secret police in charge of repression, including persecution, torture, kidnapping and assassination. It was replaced years later by the CNI.

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(…) Then, they pull my father out of the car, they kneel him down, they take out a gun and put it against his head, “Ask for forgiveness, motherfucker”. “But why?” says my father. “Ask forgiveness for what you did during the UP government. If you don’t ask for forgiveness we will kill Tatiana and all your children”. He asks for forgiveness and they release him (…). I tell you this story because it is a milestone for everything that happened after (…). During those years a feeling of hatred and anger against the military regime grew within my father. The humiliation to which David’s father was exposed was rooted in the crushing effects of living in a culture of fear. Under an authoritarian government, feeling fear was an unwilling recognition of an external source of power – the state. The encounter with the secret police was the most destabilizing event for David’s father in the chain of traumatic happenings that followed the military coup. The fear he experienced then was built upon individual fragility, the fragility of the body. As Burke states: “The emotion of fear is fundamentally about the body – its fleshness and its precariousness” (Burke 2005: 8). He was exposed to the imminence of death and the lack of control in front of state power. As we see in David’s words, the feeling of humiliation experienced by his father is still present in his detailed account of the events that was passed on to him: David: (…) Sometimes, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I feel angry at him. He told me they put a gun to his head when I was just six years old. Interviewer: Why do you think he told you this? What could you do with that information? David: That’s right. I felt very proud when he told me. But now, I look back at this, and I realize that it triggered many psychological problems at school. I felt scared at school. When I was in the classroom and I heard a police siren, I immediately thought that they were going after my father, that they were taking him to prison. I compare it to the present: imagine I tell my son that I am going to a protest. As a child, I do not know if my father is being taken to jail, or if they are going to beat him or if he is going to disappear. I was constantly terrified, every day. As we see through ‘David’s words, the returning event is one that can always come back, and so it haunts him. His father told him of his experience of fear and death when he was only six years old. By doing so, he was exposed to violence as a child. This is a striking case but not an isolated one. Though in some of my interviews I’ve found that parents conceal the reality of terror from their

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children in order to protect them, I’ve also found that within several families, parents told their children extraordinary details of what was going on, independent of the children’s age. This is likely due to living in a dictatorship, where speaking freely could be cathartic and even a practice used to demonstrate trust and love. While silence might be experienced as synonymous with fear in a dictatorship, speaking could be practised as resistance. Through the years, David’s father became involved in clandestine groups; he bought a printing press and started producing pamphlets against the dictatorship. As his anger grew, after a few years he ended up involved in a leftist terrorist group. In 1987, the family had to leave the country after finding out that he was blacklisted and intelligence services were planning to kill him. Once the family left the country, his father suffered from a new deep depression: Then, my father gets a new state of depression, the biggest one that he has had. He realized he was living in a country where nothing happens and that he was far away from his own country. Those were his last days before passing away in 1993 due to gastric cancer. As a psychologist, I can tell you that it was completely self-induced; he couldn’t cope with living abroad. What seems terrible to me is that the last year he went to see a Swedish-Jewish psychiatrist who had been in a concentration camp….This triggered an outbreak in my father, and he went back to when DINA agents put a gun to his head and ordered him to ask for forgiveness. After fifteen years, this image returned and he collapsed. After a few months, the doctors found he had cancer and after two weeks he passed away. For David’s father, but also for David himself, the extreme experience of fear returned as a haunting memory. During the interview it became evident that the son’s story represented the learning process of re-telling his father’s story. His father’s emotions were so deeply transmitted, that dealing with them has been central for David to cope with his own life. Interviewer: Did you talk about your family at school? David: Never. I never talked about my family (…). I talked about history but never about my father, I never mentioned him to anyone. Interviewer: Would you say that there was a norm about not speaking? David: Yes. It wasn’t like, “don’t talk about this at school”, but more, “don’t tell this to anyone, ever”. It was the feeling one should “avoid speaking about certain things” (…). As you said, my way of taking care of my father, was to not talk about him ever. In fact, I believe this is the first time that I am talking about this without being careful, without the fear I had then…

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Interviewer: I wanted to ask you about that. How did you learn to speak about this secret? D: Therapy, a lot of therapy. I am a therapist, so from time to time I go to psychotherapy. David’s interview opens up the question of the role of the family within the passing on of traumatic experiences. It was in the heart of the family where David learned about fear. Through David’s story, we can see how his experience of fear is rooted in his early identification with his father’s story. Being a child, he was exposed to a trauma and grew up attempting to protect his father by listening to him, being his partner and being silent about his activities. He had the fantasy that as his son he could somehow redeem his father from suffering; he felt the responsibility of bringing him redemption. Until two years ago I used to dream every two or three nights of my father, of him scolding me. I always felt that my father wanted me to be like him. He felt, “I could not go to the Conservatory, so you go; I could not go to University, so you go; I am not in Chile, so you are in Chile (…)”. I became aware of the situation, and I said to myself “I can’t go on with this figure scolding me because I am not the person he wanted me to be”. Doing this was really good for me; it was rewarding, because after a working-through process I stopped dreaming of him in this way. I still dream of him, but it is not upsetting any more. In the beginning of the interview, David’s loyalty to his father was challenged when he had to deal with his old fear of talking about his family in order to give the interview. In his own words, his childhood nightmare returned, almost forty years later, as he was afraid that by telling his story his father would be jailed. After years of therapy, David realized he was dealing with ghosts. Somehow this awareness of the presence of the past allowed him to overcome the haunting legacy of trauma, frustration and fear. Ruth’s silenced fear Although it has been suggested that within Pinochet’s Chile the family acted as a shelter for mourning and the free circulation of memory (Gomez Barris 2009), I believe fear was an important aspect of everyday life, even within families. It was through the impact on private life that the culture of fear was passed on to children: many families were struck by the events and became victims of different forms of violence, ranging from exile to the loss of one or more of their

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members. In the culture of fear, the family domain suffered in two ways. On the one hand through early exposure to the literalness of trauma, as was David’s experience; on the other hand, families suffered from interrupted forms of transmission, repression and silence as we will see throughout Ruth’s case. Today a mother of two, Ruth is the child of a desaparecido (a disappeared or missing person). She was just six years old when her father, a humble peasant, was detained in their home. One of seven siblings, she belongs to a family that lived in a deprived rural area in the south of Chile. Her elder brother, though he was only seventeen years old, also disappeared. She never saw either of them again. Ruth was a child then, but she has detailed memories of the tragic day she saw them for the last time. The thing is I can’t remember my father’s face, but I remember most of the things we went through. It is like someone else’s story, but we went through it and I remember it firsthand (…) The very night the military took him away, they detained him in a place where people used to practice sports. Many people lived in the surrounding areas, so they were forced to block their windows (…). I remember that when the military left, there was heavy rain. I remember the big drops falling in the evening. The military told us that they were arresting my father to interrogate him and that he would come back the next day. We woke up very early… it is such a long story. Those were years when the dirt roads were in very bad condition, and trucks easily got stuck in the mud… [When the military truck got stuck in the mud] the Vargas boys went to help them with their oxen to move the truck. And my brother Fernando did the same, digging with a shovel and helping clean the road. He didn’t know my father was captive in one of the trucks, until he saw him. (…) When he saw my dad he didn’t want to leave him, so the military took him too. (…) He wasn’t blacklisted, but my father was (…) All we knew was that my brother was helping clean the dirt roads with his shovel when he was detained. The next day we woke up with my sister (…) We listened to the sound of the trucks when they were around, it was a nasty noise. The road was in very bad condition (…). We ran outside, and hurried over, it was like a film. They came and stopped in front of us, we thought it was our daddy who was coming back, but they threw us the shovel. One of the military men said, “Take it. We used this shovel to bury them.” Through Ruth’s memory, we can see how the shocking experience of her father’s disappearance was a traumatic experience for her family. Her memories of the last day she saw her father are still intact, at least in the way she thinks things happened. We see that many of the things she “remembers” were the product of a recollection work to reconstruct a picture. Her words allow us to see how diffi-

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cult it has been for her to cope with her father’s detention. She describes it with extraordinary care; she takes her time to describe the rain, or when she woke up. “It was like a film” Ruth says. The traumatic events were overwhelming to such an extent that they seemed unreal. In her article about state violence, Begoña Aretxaga suggests that state violence is both public and secret, and conveys phantasmal images: “It is that fantasy space within which state violence operates that gives it a surreal, uncanny, and chilling feeling, a power to ‘unmake worlds’ as it ‘unmakes’ bodies” (2000: 46). Listening to Ruth’s words, I felt she was delaying the moment she would have to say her father never came back. It seemed that the descriptive elements of the story helped her assimilate her loss, which might still seem “unreal” (or unacceptable) to her. The disappearance of her father and brother transformed Ruth’s life. From that moment on she lived in terror: terror of the military, terror of the sound the helicopters made while crossing over the sky on September 11th, terror of the authorities. She had to learn to cope with that fear and continue her everyday life. Yes, we saw the military that day, yes; we had to live close to them for many years, because the place we lived was patrolled by the military for a long time…. I always felt terror, and so did my brothers. Despite Ruth’s living with terror, she never talked publicly about her fear or about her father and brother’s disappearance. To avoid being asked about her family story when she was a girl, she created an imaginary tragic death for her father. She told this tale to her friends at school. The situation wasn’t different at home: she didn’t talk about the events to other members of her family either. They preferred to keep silent about their memories and feelings. Fear permeated her family life and silence was used as a strategy to deal with the pain. She learned to talk about it only seventeen years later, when democracy was reestablished in Chile and the first prosecutions for human rights violations began. Encouraged by the new atmosphere brought on by re-democratization, Ruth, seeking justice, presented the disappearance of her father and brother to the court. It was only then that Ruth and her family faced the past together and started to feel able to speak about it. Now we have talked more about this, now that we have grown up and we are adults, but still, just a little. Since we started bringing prosecutions against the Army we have started to create our own narratives, that is how we started [...] I think it was because of the pain that we didn’t talk. Because of my mum…we wanted to avoid making her suffer. Because each time we talk

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about this, she remembers that day as if it was now. So, we may have grown up with fear [...]” During authoritarian regimes, silence keeps the boundaries between the inside and the outside safe. With David we saw how he never talked publicly about his family, even though his father gave him a lot of information about state violence. He remained silent in order to protect them from the politics of terror and had learned how dangerous it could be to speak out under an authoritarian government. Though silence acted as a way to protect loved ones – parents, uncles, grandparents, siblings, etc. – from state terror, it was also used to protect them from suffering. As Ruth’s story shows, they avoided discussing the past within her family to protect her mother from sad memories. Hence, fear had a different implication: the fear of remembering. Here, silence is the opposite of memory, allowing for the naïve illusion that by not speaking, remembering could be avoided. Through Ruth’s words, we see that silence wasn’t only a shelter from the state, but also a shelter from the ghosts of memory. Gabriel’s embodied memory In this last section, I will draw attention to the role of the body in the transmission of fear. I will introduce another interviewee, Gabriel, a young intellectual and creative writer in his early thirties. In the interview we talked about being a child during the dictatorship – an experience we shared – and I asked him about the legacies of fear within his life. Once we “finished” our interview and were walking together before saying goodbye, Gabriel associated my question to a repetitive dream that haunts him. It is symbolic that this dream came to Gabriel once the tape recorder was off: it suggests that it could only be revealed once Gabriel had gone through his family story. I walked around Plaza Ñuñoa [a very popular park area in Santiago] and suddenly felt panicked. I saw a strange figure, like Faustus walking around the park. I recognized Pinochet’s grey suit”. During the first half of the dictatorship, the decade of fear, social meanings and spaces were disarticulated and invaded. The fear of death and social distrust were the effects of an external power over precarious bodies. In the dream, fear was presented as uncanny and Gabriel felt that Faustus was the destabilizing presence of fear in his everyday life. It shows how the dictator’s grey suit came to invade his daily life, thereby transforming it, making it uninhabitable.

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Throughout Gabriel’s story, it is clear that the tension between the body and the state that characterizes the culture of fear has been present and passed on in his family for generations. His family story is one of diasporas. Gabriel’s greatgrandfather and grandfather left Spain during Franco’s dictatorship. They were war refugees who arrived in the port of Valparaíso in the late 1930s, together with 2000 other exiles aboard the Winnipeg, a well known ship in Chile’s cultural history. After the 1973 coup, which took place almost thirty years after the Winnipeg’s arrival, Gabriel’s grandfather – then a prestigious doctor – was imprisoned and tortured. He managed to see his daughter (Gabriel’s mother), and advised her to leave the country immediately, though she wasn’t directly threatened by the regime. Reacting to her father’s fear, Gabriel’s mother went into exile for several years to a neighbouring country, where Gabriel was born. My mother grew up within a republican family, and she is the one who inherited the tragic legacy of this political default. When Gabriel looks back at his family story, he thinks it was the inherited memory of the family story – a body inscribed with fear – which made his mother leave the country and reproduce the family drama: exile and not belonging. According to Gabriel, the fear of the state imprinted within their bodies had been passed on from his great-grandfather to his grandfather, then to his mother and theyphn to him. Interviewer: Do you feel there is a pattern in your family, a diaspora transmitted among generations? Gabriel: I don’t believe in karma. Interviewer: It is not about karma perhaps, but the transmission of a disposition… Gabriel: Fear. Yes, I believe there is a physical fear. Indeed, on my mother’s side there is a huge fear of violence. Interviewer: Do you recognize it within you? Gabriel: Yes, I believe I have an inherited fear related to what can happen to my body. There is fear… My grandfather was tortured, and although he has never spoken about it, I believe that this experience has been transmitted to us through subtle but consistent interstices. He then told me a family story. Soon after Gabriel’s mother left, his grandfather was asked to provide refuge for a family friend who was being persecuted by the Military Junta. Though he had himself been a refugee, he refused; he couldn’t act on his moral conviction, he was afraid of the ghost of war memories. Instead,

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he gave her money, a bus ticket and elegant clothes to escape. He went back to the memory of his body, the memory of fear. Through Gabriel’s voice, I could still feel his grandfather’s shame for not being able to act beyond his fear. It was memory that was at stake. What my grandfather did was remember what women did to escape from Franco (…) He remembered that, and after witnessing the meaning of war, he used one of the European refugee’s resources. However, he couldn’t [help his family friend]. I think he felt very bad about the way he behaved, but he just wasn’t able. Making a parallel between Gabriel’s dream and his family legacy, we see how fear and dread can have similar meanings. They both refer to a power which has no name, which is everywhere and can become terrifying. Moreover, both are felt in the body, and both reveal its fragility. Perhaps we can see in Gabriel’s dream a fragment of an inherited fear coming from his traumatic family past, a fear that has not been exhausted through narratives, and has thus been passed on.

C ONCLUSIONS Through the analysis of David, Ruth and Gabriel’s life stories, I have focused on how state violence experienced by people in opposition to the coup after September 1973 has had an “afterlife” amongst a second generation. I have suggested that part of the afterlife of Pinochet’s regime includes efforts to learn to talk about the past, finding ways of overcoming fear in everyday life, the difficult task of recognizing painful family legacies, among other struggles. In order to demonstrate this, I have analysed how families were dramatically affected by fear during the dictatorship. Fear was a part of family life, and became interwoven into the second generation’s experience of the world, even long after the coup as an event had passed. Throughout the interviews, I have tried to show how fear still haunts the second generation, in diverse ways, and how they still struggle with past experiences of humiliation, loss, ostracism, torture and disappearance that were not necessarily endured directly by them. In David and Ruth’s accounts, we saw how the traumatic event of the military coup is at the core of their life stories. For both of them, talking about those traumatic events is a starting point in their process of identity construction. In both cases, talking about the September 11 chain of events was challenging and we were able to see how silence was used as a mechanism for protection (most clearly in David’s case). Also, children were often the keepers of that silence,

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even when they didn’t fully understand it. Frequently, children had to cope with fear and silence without being able to rationalize their experience. Through Gabriel we saw a different way of dealing with the passing on of the experience of state violence. Gabriel’s story is about family legacies that are passed on through one generation to another, as inherited patterns of choice and circumstance. Acknowledging the strong connection between fear and body, the story of the great-grandchildren of Spanish civil war refugees opened up the question of transmission through the body. Here I have followed the unspoken and ghostly presence of fear, as a part of family legacies and how they return through generations. Looking at the intergenerational transmission of the experience of state violence, I wish to draw attention to the fact that the passing on of such experiences is not necessarily connected to speaking; transmission can happen dissociated from the very act of speaking. Narratives and silence are not the only ways of passing on fear.

R EFERENCES Arendt, Hannah (1950): Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps. Jewish Social Studies, 12(1): 49-64. Argenti, Nicolas & Katharina Schramm (2010): Remembering Violence. Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission. New York: Berghahn. Aretxaga, Begoña (2000): A Fictional Reality. Paramilitary Death Squads and the Construction of State Terror in Spain. In: Sluka, Jeffrey (Ed.): Death Squad. The Anthropology of State Terror. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; pp. 46-69. Bourke, Joanna (2005): Fear. A Cultural History. London: Virago. Cappelletto, Francesca (Ed.) (2005): Memory And World War II: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg. Caruth, Cathy (Ed.) (1995): Trauma. Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chambers, Ross (2002): Orphaned Memories, Foster-Writing, Phantom Pain: The Fragments Affair. In: Miller, Nancy & Jason Tougaw (Eds.): Extremities. Trauma, Testimony and Community. Urbana: University of Illinois Press; pp. 92-111. Constable, Pamela & Arturo Valenzuela (1991): A Nation of Enemies. Chile Under Pinochet. New York: Norton.

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Corradi, Juan, Patricia Weiss & Manuel Antonio Garretón (Eds.) (1992): Fear at the Edge. State Terror and Resistance in America Latina. Berkeley: University of California Press. Das, Veena (2007): Life and Words. Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press. Feilowitz, Marguerite (1998): A Lexicon of Terror. Argentina and the Legacies of Torture. New York: Oxford University Press. Gómez Barris, Macarena (2009): Where Memory Dwells. Culture and State Violence in Chile. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Gordon, Avery (1997): Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hirsch, Marianne (2008): The Generation of Postmemory. Poetics Today, 29(1): 103-128. – (1997): Family Frames. Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hoffman, Eva (2005): After Such Knowledge. A Meditation on the Aftermath of the Holocaust. London: Vintage. Jelin, Elizabeth (2002): Los Trabajos de la Memoria. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de España Editores. Passerini, Luisa (1992): Memory and Totalitarianism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Semelin, Jacques (2007): Purify and Destroy. The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide. New York: Columbia University Press. Stern, Steve (2006a): The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile. Vol. I: Remembering Pinochet’s Chile. On the Eve of London 1998. Durham: Duke University Press. – (2006b): The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile. Vol. II: Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973-1988. Durham: Duke University Press. Verdugo, Patricia (1999): Bucarest 187. Mi Historia. Santiago: Editorial Sudamericana. Filmography Estadio Nacional. DVD. Directed by Carmen Luz Parot, 2002. El Eco de las Canciones, DVD, Directed by Antonia Rossi. Santiago, 2010.

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Reports The National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report, 1991. The National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture Report, 2004.

Familial Discussions in the Context of Memory Research on the Second World War Expectations and Disappointments R ENÉE W AGENER

In the run-up to the 20th anniversary celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the usual Sunday press club show was broadcast by the television station “First German Television” (ARD), replete with pundits from the press and journalism. This time, however, all those present originated from East Germany, and they were not only supposed to comment on the events of the past and of today, but also to contribute their personal memories. However, one of the four guests, an author, was abroad during that time in one of the highly coveted temporary work stipend positions in Switzerland; a young journalist made it clear that she was a child at the time and could barely remember her participation in the citizens’ gatherings; and a journalist from a rural area had followed most of the events on television. The latter was also the one who praised the television for its important role in the events leading up to the opening of the German borders. I do not intend to address the historicization of the German reunification here, but rather the status of the Second World War in Luxembourg familial memory. This anecdote is nevertheless striking and exemplary of how shared memory of collective events functions. It depicts the heterogeneity of witnesses’ personal memories, or even their lack thereof, about events which are presented as historical upheavals, but also the role of the media in the homogenizing of innumerable individual experiences into one more or less uniform narrative.

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This situation is similar to that of the Second World War contemporary witnesses that I interviewed for the LUX-ID research project.1 Out of the six families researched for this paper, a minority of the altogether nine contemporary witnesses spent the wartime in Luxembourg: one went to the Eastern Front as a member of the Wehrmacht, one fled to Belgium as a resistance fighter, two fought as soldiers for the Allies, one witness was relocated to eastern Germany, one witness spent part of the war as a youth at one of the German boarding schools belonging to the Adolf-Hitler-Schule institutions, and one witness suffered from a lapse of memory at the time of the interview. Only one woman, a member of a peasant family, reported on having lived continuously in Luxembourg during the war, in a small village in the north of the country. The personal memories, which are central to the discussions, cannot therefore be bundled up into one homogeneous whole: they provide a multitude of accounts of disparate fates told from various perspectives. However, without a doubt, the memory of the Second World War represents a central element of the national discourse in Luxembourg as well, while the other fields of memory research investigated within the scope of the LUX-ID project, namely changes in rural life and in the steel workers milieu as well as immigration, take up more of a peripheral position in the basic national narrative. This weak foundation of collective experiences brings up a multitude of questions concerning the LUX-ID research project’s goals. The plan was to use familial interviews to consider the relationship between the basic national narrative and private memory specifically and, moreover, to clarify how the basic narrative is being renegotiated as part of generational changes. For example, the idea was to perform a comparative analysis of to what degree the tendency toward “cumulative heroisation” is to be found in Luxembourg, a tendency described by Harald Welzer as existing in Germany. 2 In addition, one topic which has been researched on a European level was also supposed to be investigated regarding Luxembourg; namely, the question of whether the distinction between perpetrators and victims is replaced by a victimisation of the entire war genera-

1

The research project LUX-ID of the University of Luxembourg was interested in family memory of the Second World War as well as of immigration and changes in the rural world and in the steel industry. It thus belongs to a rather new series of tentatives – speaking for Luxembourg – to analyse whether and how the memory of major historical events such as World War II, but also of other, less dramatic experiences of loss or transformation in specific communities, is passed on from one generation to the next.

2

See Welzer et al. 2002 and Welzer 2007.

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tion, especially for the younger generations. Finally, there was an investigation into the significance that the contemporary witnesses’ handed down experiences can still have for their children and grandchildren, given the increasing temporal distance from the Second World War. One of the central focuses of our research project was therefore the familial memory itself, which is formed out of a complex interaction between the contemporary witnesses’ memories, familial transmission – in other words, the transmission of information – and the (re)interpretation of this information in the context of familial communication. The other central focus was the question of how this familial memory relates to the basic national narrative. 3 In the following section, I will ruminate upon these questions and their implementation in research praxis.

O RAL H ISTORY

VERSUS

M EMORY R ESEARCH

When I speak of disappointed expectations in the title of my paper, I am not only referring to those of the researchers who set up the project, but also to those of the interviewed families, since members of these families each had his/her own ideas in mind when they accepted the invitation to talk. When I asked one of my contemporary witnesses, I’ll call him Paul Kohnen, where he was sent as an Allied soldier, he reported that he participated in the landing in Normandy. R.W.: Ah yes, so that means that you were, uh, a part of all of that? P.K.: Yes, uh, I can, one minute [gets up to get something, 14 second pause]. There’s a lot written about it. Here’s everything that’s written on the (uh, yeah, hmm, hmm) battery, you know.4 This was not an isolated reaction throughout the discussions. Contemporary witnesses repeatedly tried to locate their narratives within a more global framework with the aid of official accounts. Others open up the photo album, show army

3

On the communicative production of the past in the context of the family, see Jureit 2006: 66 et seq.

4

R.W.: Ah jo, dat heescht, dat hutt Der alles äh matgemaach? P.K.: Jo, äh, ech kann Iech, eng Minutt [steet op, geet eppes sichen, 14 Sekonne Paus]. Do gëtt et ganz Literatur dervun. Hei ass déi ganz Literatur vun der (ah jo, hnhn, hmhm) Batterie, net.

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badges that they have kept as souvenirs, or medals which are expressions of the public offices’ recognition of their actions. I understand the initiative to provide supporting documentation or additional information not just as an attempt to inscribe oneself into the official public history as individual contemporary witnesses, but rather also as the result of the mistaken notion that our research project was an oral history project, that we wanted to once again highlight the history of the Second World War “from the bottom up”. It is relevant here to point out that the oral history movement, a movement which has been growing in Europe since the seventies, initially gained relatively little ground in Luxembourg, contrary to in its neighbouring countries. Other than the documentary film Schwaarze Schnéi (“Black Snow”) (AFO 1985) which included testimonies from 26 Nazi concentration camp survivors, up until the end of the nineties, there were only isolated initiatives aimed at collecting interviews with contemporary witnesses, for instance with Second World War witnesses. For example, the Centre national de l’audiovisuel, the national conservation authority for documents produced in Luxembourg, has collected audio and film interviews. Also, the National Archive has conserved some interviews that they recorded with contemporary witnesses, for example, with people who participated in the Spanish War. The Musée national d’histoire militaire, as well as the Centre des migrations humaines, which has a different focus from the former, have also become active. In contrast, initiatives by private groups or associations, as well as academic projects in the area of oral history, have been rare up until now. One could claim that historical research in Luxembourg has skipped a step in this regard. It is only recently that this gap seems to be closing more and more, thanks to various initiatives, both on an academic level as well as in the area of local history studies. For projects like ours which deal with memory research, it is not always easy to separate oneself from the classic form of “oral history”, something that has above all become a generally known catchphrase, whose methods and goals are fundamentally different from those of memory research. Some of my conversation partners saw an opportunity in the interviews to record at least a part of their life memories. One participant expressed that he wanted to get inspiration from our methods for his own memoirs project. Some members of the 2 nd and 3rd generations apparently expected that, through research discussions, they could gain new, to-date withheld information about their families’ pasts in a roundabout way. One family discussion fell through because the 2 nd generation representative would not allow himself to be dissuaded from the idea that his knowledge about the Second World War should be verified.

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The expectation of an “oral history” discussion also seemed to me to be visible in the reaction to the axiom of interview anonymity. While we emphasized this aspect in preparation for the discussions, some contemporary witnesses seemed disappointed, specifically because their name and their history would not show up in our publications as such. On the other hand, for other participants, who had spent more time reflecting on the concept of memory research, there is a lack of a certain spontaneity. This is due to the fact that, while they are recounting their memories, they already know that we are less interested in the content than in the form of representation. The fundamental question is therefore how families should be prepared for the discussions in advance.

U NCONSIDERED B IOGRAPHICAL ASPECTS I conducted one family interview with a contemporary witness who was born in 1917 and came from a small village in the north. During the Second World War, François Kinsch (pseudonym) hid a total of five young men who had received an enlisting order to join the Wehrmacht. He was betrayed and had to flee to Belgium. After the war, he moved to – what was at the time known as – the Belgian Congo with his wife in 1952 and stayed for a few years. Kinsch emphasizes that, for him, the war was no longer an issue after it was over: François Kinsch: But now, it was, it was over, as, as they say. It had, a new life phase began. I still remained, a farmer, and afterwards I joined the potato farming cooperative [...] Should I continue with my life story or is that, does that not have anything to do with the war?5 The insecurity about what belongs to the war history continues in the following passage: F.K.: […] and back then, I had always been partial to going there. But nothing happened until, uh, ‘52, yeah ‘52 and then. Then we went to Congo. R.W.: Ah ok, ah ok. F.K.: Yes.

5

F.K.: Mee elo, t’war, t’war ofgeschloss, wéi, wéi ee seet. Et hot, et gung elei en neit Liewensof/ of/ ofschnëtt lass. Ech blouf dunn nach elo Bauer, an duerno sinn ech dunn elo op, äh, an Setzgromperegenossenschaft, […]. Soll ech dann duerno mat mengem Liewe viru foueren oder ass dat, dat huet näischt méi mam Krich ze dinn?

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R.W.: [laughs] That’s another story, I’d say. F.K.: Yes, yes, that doesn’t have anything to do with the uh, war here, and with the, it is/ R.W.: Or does it have something to do with it? Were you fed up here # or F.K.: Not at all, no, no, that was completely independent of, that was a private story, very private.6 First of all, this excerpt demonstrates the contemporary witness’ insecurity about my interests as interviewer. He is aware that I want to listen to him as a contemporary witness of the Second World War, and he proves to be someone who “experienced a lot” in the war. Nevertheless, his war history is embedded in a life history in which it is only one of several prominent elements. It therefore makes sense that, for him personally, his wartime was something that was finished after the end of the war and that it didn’t have an effect on decisions made later, at least not ostensibly. It comes across here that the witness doesn’t just want to orientate himself based on my interests, but that he also of course knows to place more value on his war experiences than on his later experiences. While his war narrative will consequently become “public”, he presents his Congo experience for that reason not just as “completely independent” but also as “private”. As interviewer, I am likewise implicated in this logic. A biographical interview is not what is desired, instead, it is the Second World War which constitutes, in Welzer’s terms, “the main subject matter of remembrance in familial discussions and individual discussions” (Welzer 2001: 169) 7. The fact that the war is a concluded event leads to the interviewer taking an approach that is thematically limiting, and s/he might not then notice the possible links between experiences during pre-wartime, wartime and post-wartime periods. The interviewer’s actual experiences emphasize some of the weaknesses in the methodology concerning thematic and lifetime scope. The strategy of delving 6

F.K.: […] an déi Zäit, ech hat ëmmer e klenge Faibel fir dohinner ze goen. Dat ass awer näischt ginn bis, eh, 52, jo 52, an elo, du si mir an de Congo gaangen. R.W.: Ah sou, ah ok. F.K.: Jo. R.W.: {laacht} Dat ass eng aner Geschicht, géif ech soen. F.K.: Jo, jo, dat huet näischt méi mat dem äh, Krich hei ze dunn, a mat der, t’ass jo/ R.W.: Oder huet et eppes domat ze dinn? Hat der es genuch hei# oder F.K.: Guer net, nee, nee dat war ganz onofhängeg, dat war eng privat Geschicht, ganz privat.

7

Here, in Germany, the main focus is not WWII but National Socialism.

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straight into wartime memories during conversations with contemporary witnesses without including the before and after from the onset does not only allow informational content to be lost which would contribute to the understanding of the narrative’s development and which is naturally always interesting to the historian as well; in addition, it might impede the actual goal of the study, namely, a differentiated analysis of the transmission of memory in the family. For example, Gabriele Rosenthal’s biographical-narrative interviews (1999: 13 et seq.) stand in contrast to Welzer’s method in that there is an initial phase of the process where a person interviewed is asked to tell his/her life story. A familial discussion then follows which takes on various themes that appeared during the individual discussions, the participants in the familial discussions are picked by the research team however.8

R ELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE B ASIC N ATIONAL N ARRATIVE AND P RIVATE M EMORY Alongside these disparate expectations on the part of the discussion participants and the researcher, the central topic of our research project, namely the tension between basic national narrative and private, familial memory, was based on two premises which would be challenged in the course of the conversations: on the one hand, as suggested earlier, the existence of a distinct historical consciousness in Luxembourgian families, and on the other hand the supposition of the existence of functioning mechanisms for the transmission of familial memory. In the introduction to “The Age of Extremes”, Eric Hobsbawm recounts how the French president Mitterrand paid a surprise visit to Sarajevo on June 28, 1992. Sarajevo found itself at the centre of the beginning of the Balkan war, and Mitterrand had chosen the anniversary of the 1914 assassination there of the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, the act that precipitated the First World War. This gesture was noticed publicly, but not understood in its historical context. “The historical memory was no longer alive”, according to Hobsbawm (Hobsbawm 1995: 3). He continues:

8

“An essential criterion”, according to Rosenthal, “is the consideration of how we can help the family to open up familial dialogue.” An explicit goal of this method entails, namely, a socio-therapeutic intention, alongside the attainment of knowledge from biographical research (Rosenthal 1999: 13 et seq.).

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The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one’s contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century. Most young men and women at the century’s end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in (Hobsbawm 1995: 3).

Hobsbawm therefore claims that the linking mechanism between the present experiences of older generations and those of the young generations doesn’t function in our times anymore. This thesis is also advanced by other authors. Paul Connerton points to the broadening of spaces of forgetfulness and ignorance which is specific to our time. In doing so, he differentiates between three levels of memory: cognitive, personal and habit memory. Among other arguments which Connerton proposes with this differentiation, is that the fast pace of urban places and spaces, and of images and news has increased exponentially, while at the same time our life expectancy has risen. In addition, a growing part of experience takes place indirectly through a display screen. Important personal experiences, like one’s career, are fragmented. Through the inflation and therefore devaluation of images, the cultural value of personal memory is diminished. Connerton claims the existence of a memory policy within a political-economic system “which systematically generates a post-mnemonic culture – a modernity which forgets” (Connerton 2009: 139-147). François Hartog stipulates a “presentism” in modern societies. In contrast to earlier eras, first characterized by “pastism” and then by “futurism” beginning with the French Revolution, our society has been suffering from the “dictatorship of the present” since the 1970s. In this case, the future is experienced as threatening, while commemoration has taken the place of a failed memory process (Hartog 2006: 62, 71 et seq.). Meinrad Ziegler arrives at a somewhat different conclusion. In his empirical study of a three generation family, he develops the concept of “social inheritance”. He underscores that, “in a culture of change, very different social, cultural and historical experiences shape the members of various generations” (Ziegler 2000: 47). Returning to Hobsbawm’s example, the question would be whether it was perhaps simply that different significant historical events were formative for the youth in the nineties than those that were assumed by the historian. Ziegler primarily cites the social movements which developed after the May ‘68 cultural revolution as the “social inheritance” of today’s generations. This offers a possible explanation for the modest level of knowledge which is observable among today’s younger generations concerning the Second World

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War: to an even greater extent than their parents, they simply have another “social inheritance” to manage. In any case, Ziegler cannot assert the veracity of “the claim that it is typical for today’s young generation to have a general loss of historicity”, as concerns the family that he researched (Ziegler 2000: 249). He makes the general assertion that: In the process of the conscious adoption and transformation of social inheritances, historical time remains subjectively experienceable, even in periods marked by upheaval and change. This presupposes that societal actors understand themselves to be heirs who are positioned within the context of a particular tradition and who have the opportunity to work actively on the transformation of this inheritance (Ziegler 2000: 246 et seq.; translation by the author).

National discourse and historical consciousness Hobsbawm’s thesis regarding the younger generation’s “historylessness” is also confirmed during our discussions overall. A “double” historylessness is observed here: first, the lack of knowledge about important elements of the basic national narrative within many Luxembourgian families, and second, the lack of a strong transmission of family memory within the family. Among other aspects, the extent to which a generation has a connection to the past experiences of the parents or grandparents is dependent upon the ability to locate the family history’s private interpretation within the scope of the basic national narrative. In doing so, one must ask to what extent a national history discourse can even be established in Luxembourg. Namely, in the case of the contemporary witnesses, it is conspicuous how little acquired knowledge they appear to possess on wartime events in Luxembourg. As presented in the first chapter, some contemporary witnesses attempt to align their wartime experiences with the official historical representation by referencing, for example, wartime literature. However, all in all, the basic national narrative is barely present in all of the interviews with the first generation. For instance, the participants recounted little about two essential events in the basic national narrative, and that only when asked: the 1942 strike movement and the destruction of the national monument Gëlle Fra by the National Socialist occupying forces. In contrast, linking elements in the collective memory are broadly applied, drastic measures which changed the personal lives of thousands of people. For example, the forced recruitment of Luxembourgian men, as well as its counterpart, forced labour for women, but also the compulsory relocation of

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individual families. To a lesser degree, Luxembourgian men’s participation in the war as Allied soldiers or as resistance fighters was also a formative experience. The same is true for military events with a regional effect, for instance, the evacuation of the south, the Battle of the Bulge or the American troops’ arrival at the capital. All of these experiences were collective two-fold – they were often experienced as a group and they affected numerous people. On the other hand, seldom does the familial memory prove itself to be the storehouse of those events that are suppressed by the basic national narrative, although they belong to the central aspects of the Second World War. For instance, the persecution of Jews which affected almost 4,000 people in Luxembourg and is barely considered in the national discourse should be considered here in particular. The deportations of over 1,200 Jews are barely addressed in the family discussions within non-Jewish families, for example (Commission 2009: 12 et seq.)9. An essential reason for the low level of knowledge regarding the basic national narrative is the increasingly inferior role that national history has played in school lessons since the post-wartime period in comparison to the history of neighbouring countries. Péporté et al. do maintain that history lessons on national history were safeguarded by specific history school books, they qualify this however by saying, “Indeed, the Luxembourg school system left it up to history teachers themselves to determine the use they wished to make of the recommended texts” (Péporté et al. 2010: 69 fn. 24). It is therefore possible that the younger generations have even less access than in other countries to any comparison between the basic national narrative and family memory. Accordingly, these younger generations might sense the need “to set right” the family memory against the backdrop of this basic narrative; for example, for the purpose of the heroisation of the contemporary witnesses.10

9

This pattern is also recognizable in other countries; cf. Claudia Lenz, who calls the fact that the persecution of Jews and the Holocaust is a topic which is not broached, for example, with regard to Norway, a “telling gap” (Lenz 2007: 62).

10 Cf. Welzer & Lenz, who assert that in the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark, there is a stronger reference to official historical representations than to familial memory in comparison to Germany. The authors put forward the thesis, however, that private transmission plays a subordinate role in these countries due to a past which is registered as unproblematic (Welzer & Lenz 2007: 34). See Lohl (in this collection) regarding the issue of German youth’s stores of knowledge about the Second World War and specifically concerning national socialist terror. This paper questions Welzer

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Moreover, 20th century European history and both world wars were not dealt with very much in school lessons. A member of the second generation brings his lack of scholarly confrontation with the topic “Second World War in Luxembourg” to the point in the following way: Olivier Kohnen: We did the Greeks and the Romans in German, then we did the Greeks and the Romans in French, and then, uh, uh, we didn’t see anything of the First and Second World Wars. 11 However, even if the third generation seems to have been extensively, systematically engaged with the Second World War, under the scope of “Holocaust pedagogy”12 that is also identifiable in Luxembourg, this occurred above all in a European context and less in a national historical one. Familial memory and the family model Due to their rudimentary knowledge about the basic national narrative of the Second World War, contemporary witnesses’ subsequent generations have limited manoeuvring room when it comes to embedding their parents’ or grandparents’ narratives within this context. At the same time, however, they also seem to have a weaker connection to the chain of familial transmission than was the case with earlier generations. One cause of the poorer transmission of private memories could be the family constellation and the disappearance of what is perceived by us to be the classic family model. For instance, we were continuously confronted during the project with the fact that families did not conform to our presupposed three generation model, whether due to divorce, geographical mobility or childlessness.

and his colleagues’ assumption that the third generation, in particular, commands extensive knowledge about this area (see Welzer, Moller & Tschugnall 2001). If that is the case, an essential result of the Welzer study would lose its substance, namely, that the more comprehensive one’s historical knowledge is, the more developed the need to whitewash one’s own grandparents’ history. 11 O.K.: Mir hunn d’Griechen an d’Réimer op däitsch gemaach an dann d’Griechen an d’Réimer op franséisch gemaach an dann eh, eh, mir hu keen Eischten a keen Zweete Weltkrich gesinn. Ech weess net wéi et dir gaang ass, mee mir, mir hunn näischt gesinn. 12 See Welzer 2007: 33.

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In research on family memory, the supposition that traditional family ties are still significantly pronounced is often apparent. Ulrike Jureit writes, for example: Beyond the socioeconomic implications […], it is characteristic for families with several generations to be marked by often life-long, frequent, meaningful and deep emotional connections between family members and that they differentiate themselves from most other relationships through this positive or negative intense bond, due to the fact that it often implies close contact that plays an important role in daily life (Jureit 2006: 62 et seq.).

There is a clear danger that research is disregarding modern family models. As early as in 2001, in the description of his research project “Transmission of Historical Consciousness”, Harald Welzer ascertained that: [A]s is well known, in no way do families always function as communities of communication and memory, and they do often break up, which consequently makes it impossible to remember a commonly shared past in the present (Welzer 2001: 165).

Nevertheless, he appears primarily to look for the “transfer of history in conversations between generations” within the nuclear family (Welzer 2001: 168). For the three generation interview methodology is built upon the understanding that a family can consist of one contemporary witness, or better, a married couple who are both contemporary witnesses, a child and a grandchild. At the same time however, the family is perhaps also overemphasized as the producer of individual memory, in comparison to other memory communities. On the one hand, the memory process may by all means occur in other intimate, personal frameworks – for example, in the extended family circle (uncles, aunts, both blood-related and by marriage, older cousins)13 – on the other hand however, it may also take place with the neighbours, among friends and acquaintances, etc.14 Alongside this, there are also new ways of life in which important per-

13 For a discussion of siblings’ collective handling of their family’s past, see for example Favard, who writes of a “collective pot” in which the siblings combine their individual familial memories together. She points out that familial transmission doesn’t only bond together different generations of one family, but also the members of one particular generation of a family (Favard 2006: 88). 14 In this regard, cf. Lequin & Métal, who point to the interconnectedness between the members of a memory community in their study of the collective memory of a local group of steel workers, and despite their applied method of individual interviews,

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sons are more and more often individuals who also come from outside of the circle of blood relations. Finally, it is important to ask if the intrafamilial communication of memory is being more and more limited to an exchange between only two generations. The three generation interview model is based on the assumption that there is a close bond between these generations. Indeed, earlier, grandparents, parents and children mostly lived close to each other or even in the same house (though this was above all the case in rural spaces back then, as it is today). However, in the meantime this constellation has become more rare. Grandparents mostly live separately from the subsequent generations – possibly in a retirement home. The result of this could be that familial memory is not in and of itself put into question, but that it is limited in time and more quick to fade. Interrupted transmission To what extent Jureit’s assumed intense bonds still systematically exists in 21 st century families may therefore be questioned. We will not delve here into the question of how we can succeed at creating new research models which allow for patchwork families. However, the transmission of familial memory is often also challenged during the analysis of three generation interviews in which, for all intents and purposes, this emotional connection still emerges. It is possible that this is especially the case in families in which the contemporary witnesses have traumatic memories of the Second World War. I would like to cite the Eschenauer family as an example. The daughter of Fernand Eschenauer, a contemporary witness who was forcibly recruited to fight on the side of the Germans during the war, says the following to her father during a family discussion: Christiane Goedert-Eschenauer: Yes, but it’s just something that I wanted to say to that. At that time, we were, now we know, w/ w/ we don’t ask anymore, earlier, we would have liked it if you had told us some things sometimes. But of course, we said then, oh come on, let’s not ask anymore, it’s not worth it, since it’s much too terrible for someone who experienced it when we ask [...].15 speak of a “multiple dialogue” and of an “informal community” (Lequin & Métal 1980: 160). 15 C.G.-E.: Jo mee ‘t ass just eppes wat ech dozou wollt soen. Mir wieren an der Zäit, lo wësse mer, m/ mi/ mir froe lo net méi, an der Zäit hätte mer gär gehat, wann s du eis heiansdo Saachen erzielt häss. Mee natierlech, do hu mer gesot, oh komm mer froen

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And at some point later, the contemporary witness addresses his daughter and his grandson in the following way: Fernand Eschenauer: Yes, but you have generally – I mean that I’m not the only one that has said this – you have heard in general, that in the books, uh, about the boys [synonym for those forcibly recruited] and so on, that a lot is said about the fact, that they can’t speak very directly about their, uh, life endangering, uh, things, can’t very directly, very, t/ t/, that, uh talk about that. It, it sits inside of you, I dream sometimes at night about it, still today. Especially as you get older when you can’t sleep very well, then you’re suddenly in a situation somewhere, where you wake up and where, alas. It sits there inside, but to then, make a, a religious truth out of that, if I want to say it that way, that the children and the children’s children, that they have to take that with them. So, it’s good what they’ve seen, that they, that they know what happened, in general, but, but if that, the details from Grandpa on top of that, if they were still interesting, well that’s not so important.16 This contemporary witness experiences his personal memories of the Second World War – above all the experiences at the front – as so painful, that he avoids discussion about it. It seems to be for his own protection when he describes his children and grandchildren’s knowledge about what happened to him personally as less relevant than their general knowledge about “what happened”. If and when they even try, the children and grandchildren cannot break through this protective behaviour, observable in the cases of several contemporary witnesses who were at the Front.

net méi no dat huet jo kee Wäert, well et ass ze vill schlëmm fir een, deen dat erliewt huet, wa mir do froen ginn […]. 16 F.E.: Jo mee, Dir hutt allgemeng, mengen ech net eleng, datt dat lo hei vu mir gesot gëtt, am Allgemengen hutt Der schonn héieren, datt och an deene Bicher, ääh wou Jongen an sou virun, datt vill gesot gëtt, datt déi net sou direkt vun hiren, äh, liewensgeféierlechen äh Saachen, direkt sou, sou, sch/ sou sch/, sou kënnen dat äh schwätzen. Dat, dat sëtzt dobannen, ech dreemen nuets alt heiansdo dovunn, lo nach. Besonnesch am Alter, wann ee mol net sou gutt schléift dann ass een e beemol nach irgendwou an enger Situatioun, wou een dann erwärcht, a wou jee. Dat sëtzt do, mee, mee fir elo eh, fir dann dat do eng, eng, eng Glaubenswahrheet draus ze maachen, wann ech et sou wëll soen, datt d’Kanner an d’Kannskanner dat nach alles mussen mat virun huelen. Also dat ass gutt, wéi si do dat gesinn hunn, datt se, datt se wëssen wat sech ofgespillt huet, an deem Ganzen, mee, mee ob dat, déi Detailer vum Bop herno, ob déi nach interessant waren, dat ass jo net sou wichteg.

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While the focus here is put very heavily on the former soldiers’ suffering, the fact that these men, although forced, also became perpetrators, is barely spoken about explicitly. It is only in the case of the witnesses who joined the Allied armies that the problem of one’s involvement as a perpetrator is addressed in individual discussions. A daughter of a veteran of the American army said the following: Carole Kohnen: […] I can imagine that he also shot quite a lot of people or something like that. R.W.: Do you think so? C.K.: Yes, I’d think so. I mean, if he fought, then it’s pretty obvious. (Hmm) And I also understand if he doesn’t want to talk about it and if he doesn’t want to think about it, because otherwise life would actually be impossible if he were just reproaching himself for it and (hmm) but that’s why I understand that he doesn’t want to talk about it.17 Being silent in order to be able to live with oneself – this reading (one which is critical of war) clearly differs from the heroisation tendencies as they were still common with respect to veterans of the Second World War a few decades ago. 18 It is a silence which also appears to be accepted within this family as the modus vivendi however – even if the price of these kinds of protection mechanisms is the broken or limited transmission of family memory. Within the family, the impact of the contemporary witnesses’ perceived injustice and suffering doesn’t seem to necessarily lead to the maintaining of memory through the contemporary witnesses or even to a stronger transmission of memory between the three generations. This is also demonstrated by the example of the Meyers (pseudonym), a Jewish family; an example which exhibits

17 C.K.: Well ech ka mer och virstellen, ech ka mer virstellen datt hien och zimmlech vill Leit dann erschoss huet oder irgendwéi sou eppes.“ R.W.: Méngt Der, jo? C.K.: Jo ech géif mengen. Ech mengen wann e mattgekämpft huet, dann ass dat och zimmlech selbstverständlech. (hmhm) An do verstinn ech och, wann een net well driwwer schwätzen, a wann een net wëll drun denken, well soss wär d’Liewen am Fong onméiglech, wann ee sech nëmme Virwerf géif dowéinst maachen, an (mhm) dowéinst verstinn ech awer datt hien net wëllt driwwer schwätzen. 18 Apparently, they are even more observable in other European countries. Welzer 2007: 33 names Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands. However, in the case of Norway, in some familial discussions a “general scepticism regarding the war” is also ascertained: see Welzer 2007: 49.

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clear intense familial bonding but in whose case this defective transmission is also noticeable. I would like to discuss this example a bit more extensively. The contemporary witness, born in 1917, experienced the 1940 occupation of Luxembourg by German troops: after he had become unemployed due to the closing of his family business by the National Socialists, he was forced to participate in the construction of the Hunsrückhöhenstraße (Hunsrück Heights Road) by the Todt Organisation before he was able to flee to Spain and to then escape to the USA by way of Portugal. He joined the security forces there and participated as a soldier in the war in the Pacific. His father, who had fled to France, was deported and murdered in Auschwitz. Two more family members were also deported and, according to research conducted later by the contemporary witness’ daughter, they presumably died while being transported to the concentration camp. There are several dissonances regarding family memory in this family. As far as the content of the discussions is concerned, the daughter and granddaughter seem frustrated by the choice of stories which are selected by the contemporary witness in memory discussions about the Second World War. Not only does the grandfather always tell the same stories, but he also excludes the descriptions of difficult situations or of his own personal reaction to his family’s fate. However, the subsequent generations’ criticism also addresses the sarcastic and provoking way in which he presents his war memories. One of the recurring themes which also comes up in the individual discussion is, for example, the statement that wartime was “a nice time”: Paul Meyers: So, I’ll tell you something, it was a nice time. R.W.: It was a nice time? Yeah? P.M.: The whole thing was a nice time. R.W.: Huh? how so? But it was also a hard time. P.M.: Well, I always had different experiences. (Hmm) More particular things (that you wouldn’t have experienced otherwise) yes.19 During the individual discussion with the daughter, this statement about wartime is transmitted in the following way: 19 P.M.: Also ech soen Iech eent, et war eng flott Zäit. R.W.: War et eng flott Zäit? Ah jo? P.M.: Dat ganzt war eng flott Zäit. R.W.: Wéi, wéisou dann? Et war jo awer och eng schwéier Zäit. P.M.: Majo ech hunn all Kéier eppes anescht erliewt. (mmhmm) Méi extra Saachen (déi der soss net erliewt hätt) jo.

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R.W.: So what are, like, the first things that you were told, uh, about the war, and also about your family’s experiences? Catherine Thiébaud-Meyers: It was nice. R.W.: Oh, ok. C. T.-M.: Everything was great and everything was nice. R.W.: Huh. That means, during your childhood it was presented that way (yes), or what? C.T.-M.: Yes, and then funny things were told, uh, and, uh, then there were other things, that were totally taboo (hmm).20 It is already clear in this example that many of the topics presented by the contemporary witness in the individual discussions are well known by his family members. However, these topics are often not, as one could have expected, formulated in the form of proper stories, but rather in the form of statements frequently made in a provoking tone. When stories are told, they are told in a telegram style, which can often only be deciphered by the family members, not by outsiders. The bits of memories offered by the contemporary witness seem like frequently employed, exchangeable pieces. However, both citations also illustrate the different perspectives of the father and daughter concerning the impact of the Second World War on their family. The contemporary witness makes his statement from his personal point of view, in which he presents the war as a time of exciting personal experiences. For the daughter on the other hand, her father’s set pieces seem to conceal the real history. She reads the statement “nice time” as an attempt to avoid difficult topics, and links this to what she considers to be missing elements in his memory discussions, in particular the reaction to the deportation and the death of the contemporary witness’ father. This incomprehension is more than a simple misunderstanding, it makes the contemporary witness and the subsequent generations’ different perspectives on the family’s traumatic experience visible. The daughter and granddaughter’s historical consciousness is an abstract one, in which their ancestors’ trauma is

20 R.W.: Wat sinn dann sou déi éischt Saachen, déi Dir verzielt kritt hutt eh, iwwert de Krich an och iwwert d’Erliewnisser an Ärer Famill? C.T-M.: Et war flott. R.W.: Ah jo. C.T-M.: Et war alles schéin an et war alles flott. R.W.: Ehe. Dat heescht an Ärer Kandheet ass et esou präsentéiert ginn (Jo) oder wéi? C.T-M.: Jo. An et sinn da witzeg Saachen erzielt ginn, äh, an äh, dann waren aner Saacher déi waren total tabu. (Mhm).

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embedded into a broader historical discourse, namely that of the official account of the Shoah. However, we are also experiencing a conflict here between the contemporary witness and his daughter regarding authority over the family history. Other than the repetitive employment of his anecdotes, the grandfather seems to have no other weapons to use against his daughter and granddaughter’s attempts to subordinate his war stories to the traumatic family history. On the other hand, these set pieces might also help him to gloss over the trauma of the loss of his father. In the individual discussion, his father’s deportation was only very briefly addressed by the contemporary witness and only upon my inquiry. During the individual discussion, the daughter explains that she first began to question her parents further after she had become an adult and especially after visiting the Yad Vashem Memorial. At that time, she started to read books about Jewish deportees and to conduct research on the members of her family who had disappeared. While the daughter breaks the taboo regarding the deportation and murder of her family members, at the same time she creates a new basis for a family memory which her father appears to withhold. Keppler writes, “Renewal and perpetuation are about the confirmation of the family’s social identity” (Keppler 2001: 155). From this perspective, the daughter is taking over her father’s role as the producer of memory in order to guarantee familial cohesion. In contrast, (public) remembrance appears to be an essential instrument for the granddaughter in order to come to terms with her family memory. She went to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp Memorial and participated in public events with contemporary witnesses who reported on their deportations. This example shows how, on the one hand, the family forms a memory community and lays a claim to a concerted family memory. On the other hand, it is not capable of telling a common history, in Keppler’s terms. The second and third generations solve this problem by searching for new ways to deal with the family memory: the daughter’s individual approach and the granddaughter’s more communally oriented approach. However, both transcend the boundaries of familial space with their different initiatives. If Maurice Halbwachs ascertains that, “it is language [...] that allows us at every moment to reconstruct our past” (1992: 173) and that human memory can only function within a collective context (Halbwachs 1992: 173)21, then we have an example here of a dysfunctional

21 “We should hence renounce the idea that the past is in itself preserved within individual memories as if from these memories there had been gathered as many distinct proofs as there are individuals. People living in society use words that they find intelligible: this is the precondition for collective thought. But each word (that is under-

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memory process in the family which doesn’t play its role as a memory community, or does so only partially. Other kinds of information sources step up in competition to that of the family. To express it in Welzer’s terms: the remembrance in the present of a commonly shared past is impossible. Family memory and historical consciousness If familial transmission is less prominent, then it is possible that that has an effect on the attitudes and behaviour of the subsequent generations. As we have observed, they are often less affected by the basic national narrative as regards remembrance of the Second World War than by representations dominated by europeanising references. We noticed less tendencies towards cumulative heroisation, built upon the need to “sugarcoat” one’s own familial memory in terms of the national discourse, than we saw individuals in “collaborator” families distancing themselves from the perpetrators, in other words, the National Socialists among their members. We likewise saw the victimisation of contemporary witnesses by their children and grandchildren, witnesses who, confronted with the dilemma of having to choose between forced military service for the Germans and desertion (with possible consequences for their family), chose the former. Moreover, there are clear tendencies among second and third generations to universalize the suffering and to victimize the perpetrator on the side of the aggressor as well, as demonstrated by the following excerpt from a familial discussion on the Germans’ attitude during the war: Robert Kinsch: There were also some there that weren’t like that, but they were forced, to # to participate. But they Maria Kinsch: Yes, as long as [unintelligible] R. K.: they just had to participate, otherwise they would have been liquidated too. They didn’t have any other choice either. There’s also probably a whole bunch that participated unwillingly in all that, wasn’t there. Of course there were also some #, who M. K.: went along with

stood) is accompanied by recollections. There are no recollections to which words cannot be made to correspond. We speak of our recollections before calling them to mind. It is language, and the whole system of social conventions attached to it, that allows us at every moment to reconstruct our past” (Halbwachs, 1992: 173).

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R. K.: were happy and went along with it, to be up there on the front lines with them, weren’t there. The way that it is everywhere with things like this. But uh. … [5 sec.].22 Parallels with other European countries show up here, namely the ascertainable tendency to represent all Second World War contemporary witnesses as victims.23 Decreasing significance of the Second World War Finally, evidence for the relativization of the Second World War’s personal significance in light of increasing temporal distance can be seen in the discussions. The need to close the chapter on this topic is observable in all generations, including those of the contemporary witnesses. The following excerpt is what the Jewish contemporary witness whose father was deported had to say about the question regarding what he thought of his daughter’s research into her family’s fate: Paul Meyers: What’s over, is over. R.W.: Hmm. P. M.: When you, well, you’ve got nothing at all anymore once you’re six feet under.24 The son of another Jewish contemporary witness explains:

22 R.K.: Do waren der och derbäi déi net sou waren, mee déi goufe gezwongen mat # mat matzemaache. Ma déi M.K. Jo, sou laang [onv] R.K.: hunn einfach musse matmaachen, soss wiren se och liquidéiert ginn. Déi haten och keng aner Wiel. Do sinn der och wahrscheinlech eng ganz Parti déi widerwëlleg dat do alles matgemaach hun, ne. Et waren der natierlech och déi # déi“ M.K.: matgelaf R.K.: frou waren a matgelaaf sinn fir kënnen do mat virbäi ze sinn, ne. Wéi dat alt iwwerall bei sou Saachen ass. Mee,

äh, ... [5 sec].

23 See, for example, Welzer 2007: 30. 24 P.M.: Wat eriwwer ass, ass eriwwer. R.W.: Mhm. P.M.: Wann Der elo, wann der op eemol ënnert dem Buedem leit, hutt Der guer näischt méi.

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Olivier Kohnen: Hmm. So I don’t concern myself with it any further. R.W.: Hmm. O.K.: Other than that I know that this past has something to do with the family. And that’s something, you can’t push that away, that’s for sure (Hm) no, and I know that the whole thing will start to become history by my daughter’s time at least R.W.: Hmm. O.K.: And, any real connection, that’s gone then anyway. 25 During a collaborator’s family discussion, the contemporary witness, who is the nephew of a collaborator, answered the question of whether the Second World War still concerns them a lot in the following way: Théo Barthelmy: No, that is in the past. And his son adds: Pierre Barthelmy: Interested, yes, but not concerned.26

C ONCLUSION To conclude, I would like to summarize my thoughts into three points: First, it is worth considering broadening the scope of the family discussions. This would affect, on the one hand, the time scope of the part of the contemporary witness’ life that is chosen – in this respect, the parts which were researched by my project colleagues are set up much more biographically, by the way. On the other hand, the choice of potential discussion partners could be broadened to

25 O.K.: Mhm. Also ech beschäftege mech weider net domatt. R.W.: Hnhn. O.K.: Ausser datt ech weess, datt eben déi Vergaangenheet eppes mat der Famill ze dinn huet. An dat ass eppes, dat kritt een net ewech gedréckt, dat ass ganz sëcher, (Hm) nee, an ech weess, datt spéitestens bei menger Duechter dat ganzt dann ufänkt, Geschicht ze ginn. R.W.: Hmhm. O.K.: An, dee reellen Bezuch deen ass souwéisou da fort. 26 T.B.: Nee, dat ass tempi passati. R.W.: Hmhm. P.B..: Interesséiert, awer net beschäftegt.

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include interview partners outside of the immediate family. This could produce interesting comparative studies – for example, on the possible variations in the transmission of memory in classic versus in patchwork families. In doing so, one could look deeper into the question of whether changed family structures affect the transmission of familial memory. What is the effect on the family memory for instance, when the immediate family no longer includes three, but instead only two generations? How does family communication change when the members of the grandparents or parents’ generation go through a divorce? What happens to the family memory when a generation remains childless? Second, it would be interesting to think together with the contemporary witnesses or also with the representatives of the second or third generation about appropriate discussion partners from all three generations – from within or outside of the scope of the family. Up until now, memory discussions were primarily researched in terms of familial, intergenerational transmission. Little attention has been granted until now to recollective narrative, whether it be between siblings or in the scope of other communities of experience. It is precisely in a society in which it can no longer be assumed per se that personal memories will be transmitted around the family table between grandparents, parents and children, that the inclusion of favoured interview partners from outside of the family would signify not only a democratization of the methodology, but also the opening up of more new fields of research. Naturally, the question regarding the aim of inquiry must be considered here: is its focus on intrafamilial three generation settings or on successful transmission? The question of whether and how memories are transmitted in families would be superseded by the question of under what conditions transmission is successful. A third aspect to research further would be whether Hobsbawm’s thesis is provable concerning the historylessness of the younger generations, in other words, their lack of a sense for historical continuity. The diverse, individual fates of the contemporary witnesses that were recorded during the interviews point to a weak foundation for collective memories that transcend the family, village and circle of friends, and not only in the third generation. While in the other part of the research project, one could not at all act on the assumption of a grand narrative, the difficulty of establishing relationships between family memory and the existing grand narrative became explicit during the family discussions on the Second World War. In the case of all three generations, discussions often revealed only a fragmentary or elusive adoption of the basic national narrative in the families. The national historical discourse appears to have a weaker impact in

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Luxembourg than in other European countries. Moreover, the familial memory discourses are apparently based to a lesser extent on a unified narrative, be it glorifying or legitimating. However, with regard to the memory of the Second World War, Michael Kohlstruck’s assertion in his book on the significance of National Socialism for the German grandchild generation appears to me to be fundamentally to the point: Beginning with the ‘first generation’ of contemporary witnesses, every generation stands in a new relation to the historical events. The generation that experienced these events speaks and keeps silent in different ways than their children, especially if the latter weren’’t born until during or after the time period in question. After the ‘second generation’, a living continuum of memory is interrupted. Starting as early as with the ‘third generation’, the grandchildren can no longer immediately experience the fortunate or catastrophic occurrences of which their grandparents were witnesses. All later generations are dependent on indirect access […] For the third generation, these past events become history and cease to remain as memories. The unity of biography and history is shattered (Kohlstruck 1997: 7).

In this regard, for the contemporary witnesses of the Second World War’s subsequent generations, the “organic relation to the public past of the times they live in”, as Hobsbawm expressed it, is more difficult than is the case for the migration experience or change in the rural environment, for example. The experience of the Second World War is – as is also the case for workers in the steel industry – a completed one, whose memory can only be transmitted to the next generations by the contemporary witnesses. Due to the limited time span of the war, there were barely any memory communities which extended over two generations.27 Already in the case of the second generation, but above all in that of the third, they only have access to “second hand” memory. Also, as far as familial transmission is concerned, it can therefore only result in a unidirectional relaying of memory, instead of an exchanging of memories. Perhaps Hobsbawm’s proposed “destruction of the past” is therefore simply the subsequent generations’ dissociation from major events as that of the Second World War.

27 Cf. Jureit 2006: 65 on the intergenerational community of experience in the context of migration. On the various perspectives of family members regarding a collectively experienced family history in the migration family, see also Lentz 2011: 98 et seq.

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R EFERENCES AFO Film (Prod.) (1985): Schwaarze Schnéi. Lëtzebuerger am Kazett. [Film] Luxembourg: Ministère des Affaires culturelles. Commission spéciale pour l’étude des spoliations des biens juifs au Luxembourg pendant les années de guerre 1940-1945 (2009): La spoliation des biens juifs au Luxembourg 1940-1945. Rapport final. Luxemburg. Connerton, Paul (2009): How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Favard, Évelyne (2006): La transmission familiale. S’approprier le passé familial entre frères et sœurs. Pensée plurielle 1: 83-89. Halbwachs, Maurice (1925): Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Hartog, François (2006) “Nos hommes politiques sont prisonniers de la tyrannie du présent.” [Interview] in: Enjeux les échos, Février 2006. Hobsbawm, Eric (1994): Zeitalter der Extreme. Weltgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts. München: Hanser. Jureit, Ulrike (2006): Generationenforschung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Keppler, Angela (2001): Soziale Formen individuellen Erinnerns. Die kommunikative Tradierung von (Familien) Geschichte. In: Welzer, Harald (Hg.): Das soziale Gedächtnis. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition; pp. 137-159. Kohlstruck, Michael (1997): Zwischen Erinnerung und Geschichte. Der Nationalsozialismus und die jungen Deutschen. Berlin: Metropol. Lenz, Claudia (2007): Vom Widerstand zum Weltfrieden. Der Wandel nationaler und familiärer Konsenserzählungen über die Besatzungszeit in Norwegen. In: Welzer, Harald (Hg.): Der Krieg der Erinnerung. Holocaust, Kollaboration und Widerstand im europäischen Gedächtnis. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer; pp. 41-75. Lentz, Fabienne (2010): Réflexions sur les discours et la mémoire de l’immigration italienne au Luxembourg. In: Boesen, Elisabeth & Fabienne Lentz (Hg./éd.): Migration und Erinnerung. Konzepte und Methoden der Forschung / Migration et mémoire. Concepts et méthodes de recherche. Münster: Lit; pp. 89-108. Lequin, Yves & Jean Métal (1980): A la recherche d’une mémoire collective. Les métallurgistes retraités de Givors. Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations. 35(1): 149-166.

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Péporté, Pit et al. (2010): Inventing Luxembourg. Representations of the Past, Space and Language from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Century. (National Cultivation of Culture, vol. 1). Leiden: Brill. Rosenthal, Gabriele (Hg.) (1999): Der Holocaust im Leben von drei Generationen. Familien von Überlebenden der Shoah und von Nazi-Tätern. Gießen: Psychosozial Verlag. Welzer, Harald (Hg.) (2007): Der Krieg der Erinnerung. Holocaust, Kollaboration und Widerstand im europäischen Gedächtnis. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. – (2001): Das gemeinsame Verfertigen von Vergangenheit im Gespräch. In: Welzer, Harald (Hg.): Das soziale Gedächtnis. Geschichte, Erinnerung, Tradierung. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition; pp. 160-178. Welzer, Harald et al. (2002): “Opa war kein Nazi”. Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. Welzer, Harald & Claudia Lenz (2007): Opa in Europa. Erste Befunde einer vergleichenden Tradierungsforschung. In: Welzer, Harald (Hg.): Der Krieg der Erinnerung. Holocaust, Kollaboration und Widerstand im europäischen Gedächtnis. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer; pp. 7-40.

The Family as a Social Frame of Memory The Example of Luxembourgian Farmer Families E LISABETH B OESEN

I NTRODUCTION For a while now, memory research has been going through what could be called a sort of a boom within the cultural and social sciences. While there was an initial predominant preoccupation with national memory 1, this fixation is gradually being overcome, both in a broadening and a narrowing sense. Scholars are now discussing transnational or cosmopolitan remembrance and European and global memories (Levy & Sznaider 2001; Assmann & Conrad 2010), while they are also looking into smaller memory collectives as objects of study, such as village communities, peer groups and, above all, the family. Harald Welzer and his colleagues at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen have conducted important research on the family, or, more precisely, on the “family as memory”, which has greatly inspired our study in Luxembourg, both conceptually and methodologically. 2 Here the family is understood as the interface and intermediary between individual or autobiographical remembering and cultural memory.3 A criticism of this concept of familial memory processes stemming from a depth psychology perspective is presented by Lohl in this publication. The present paper is also an attempt to expand the perspective of the 1

Only Nora’s monumental work on the French lieux de mémoire (Nora 1984-92), and the other projects on (European) “national sites of memory” inspired by this work, have been mentioned, cf. for example, François & Schulze 2005; see also Kmec et al. (2007) on Luxembourgian sites of memory.

2

Cf. Welzer et al. (2002) on the familial transmission of historical consciousness.

3

Cf. Lenz & Welzer 2007: 15; see also Erll 2011.

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family, although virtually in the opposite direction, namely through a consideration of the family as a supra-personal entity to which the individual belongs based on relationships of transmission or inheritance. This will be developed on the basis of empirical data collected through interviews with Luxembourgian farmer families. After presenting some general considerations regarding the family as memory community, the second part of the article will introduce and compare two families and family memories. First of all, however, a few words about the empirical approach. This study is part of a more comprehensive research project that, among other things, addressed familial processes of transmission in particular social groups in Luxembourg, namely farmers, steel workers and immigrants. 4 In all parts of the study, three-generation families were investigated. This investigation consisted of theme-centred individual interviews with at least one representative of each generation as well as a concluding “family discussion”. The majority of the chosen farmer families were those in which the third generation is also still active in the farming domain.5 The first generation representatives were encouraged to talk about their memories of farming, work and life on the farm and in the village community; members of the child and grandchild generations were asked about the corresponding stories and portrayals that were passed on within the family. Most of the individual narrations were very autobiographical; in other words, changes in farming and village life were generally portrayed by using the example of the development of the individuals’ own farming businesses and their personal capacity for, or efforts towards change. To a certain extent, this was also the case for the members of the second and third generations, who saw themselves also as “contemporary witnesses” to and subjects of the – unfinished – processes of change in question.

4

The research was conducted as part of the “LUX-ID” project at the University of Luxembourg; on methodological questions see also Wagener’s contribution in this volume.

5

In one family out of a total of ten whose interview texts were analysed, the representative of the youngest generation had decided on an occupation outside of farming. In three of the families, the subjects had stopped working in farming as of the second generation.

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M EMORY C OMMUNITY

Cultural memory research, as it has been developing for a few decades now, understands “memory” as fundamentally processual, as a creation and a continually repeated reproduction of the past in present socio-cultural contexts.6 The work of the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs was pioneering for this entire field of research. Halbwachs, who was already looking into these processes or what he calls the mémoire collective in the 1920s and 1930s7, devoted himself extensively to one memory collective in particular, that of the family. Although current research is exhibiting an increased interest in familial memory processes, there is hardly any reflection upon what precisely is to be understood under the term family memory or family remembrance.8 How does Maurice Halbwachs understand family memory? He describes the primary social framework (cadre social) as being that of direct kinship relations: father, mother, brother, etc., the real persons linked to these notions (that is to say images and names) and the perceptions of traits immutably bound to them. The family’s esprit propre is established within this framework, “… ses souvenirs qu’elle est seule à commémorer, et ses secrets qu’elle ne révèle qu’à ses membres” (Halbwachs 1994: 151). These memories reflect family traits, are an expression of its “nature” and they are “… en même temps, des modèles, des exemples, et comme des enseignements.” (ibid.).9 Halbwachs’ theoretical endeavour consists in completely linking the specific nature of familial memory to this narrow kinship framework, which involves keeping all events, interests and content which belong to other categories or social frames – occupation, social status, property, religion, etc. – analytically sep-

6

Within the confines of this article, it is not possible to provide a presentation of the conceptual development of this field of research, or of the alternative differentiations which in part replace them, for example, cultural memory, social memory etc. Among others, Erll (2005) provides an overview.

7 8

Cf. Halbwachs 1994 (1925), 1997 (1950). See Angela Keppler, who understands “unity of family history/story(ies)” as the “continuity of instances and acts of the communal memory” (Keppler 1994: 207), in other words, as a more or less ritualised event, as she described it in her study on “dinner table discussions”. It can be argued that this assignation is applicable not only to familial memory, but also to collective memories.

9

“...its memories which it alone commemorates, and its secrets that are revealed only to its members […] they are at the same time models, examples, and elements of teaching.” (Halbwachs 1992: 59).

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arate. He insists on this separation even in the extreme case of an obvious amalgamation of spheres, as is the case with the farmer families, in which, as he himself ascertains, “[...] la famille et la terre ne se détachent point l’une de l’autre dans la pensée commune” (ibid.: 15810) and where, in the words of his teacher Durkheim, “[...] les choses sont l’âme de la famille: elle ne peut s’en défaire sans se détruire elle-même” (ibid.: 15911). If one takes a closer look at Halbwachs’ work however, one can see that he is only able to maintain this part of his argument – the separation of “familial memory” from other social memory frameworks – because he narrows the notion of land or of soil to that of its handling. According to Halbwachs, due to the requirements of cultivation, the individual farmer feels bound to the farming community as a whole and not to his or her family in particular. In this sense, land is a general good. 12 The relationship to it can therefore indeed not be a part of the individually particular family memories. My research in Luxembourg clearly demonstrates that familial bonds in the farmer milieu are, or were, determined by the relationship to the land; thus land ownership was, and partially still is, constitutive to a certain extent for the family as social entity and, contrary to Halbwachs’ claim, also indeed for familial memory. A striking example of this is the rural institution of Bäisaz, which we will continue to discuss throughout the article. In Luxembourg, and in the neighbouring German regions as well, “coming into a house as Bäisaz” describes the taking in of a sibling’s child (or possibly also a great-nephew or niece) in case of childlessness in order to appoint the child as heir. The genealogical relationship is not the only basis or principal motive for this quasi-adoption, but rather the bond with the familial property and the responsibility for it. The Bäisaz is not a substitute for the missing child, but for the missing heir. Its function is defined by the relationship to a “house” and the requirements for the latter’s continued existence.

10 “...the family and the soil remain closely linked to each other in common thought.” (Halbwachs 1992: 65). 11 “Things are the soul of the family; it cannot get rid of them without destroying itself.” (quoted in Halbwachs 1992: 66). 12 “… il se rattache en réalité, et il ne peut ne pas se rattacher par la pensée à la collectivité paysanne tout entière du village et du pays, qui accomplit les mêmes gestes et se livre aux mêmes opérations que lui, dont les membres, bien qu’ils ne soient pas ses parents, pourraient l’aider et le remplacer. Il importe assez peu, pour le résultat du travail, qu’il soit fait par des parents associés, ou par un groupe de paysans sans lien de parenté. C’est donc que le travail, et le sol non plus, ne portent pas la marque d’une famille déterminée, mais de l’activité paysanne en général.” (Halbwachs 1994: 159).

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The word “house” is used here to describe an entity made up of a group of people and a farming operation, to which material and immaterial goods with important symbolic and social value are linked. The members of a “house” are not necessarily consanguineal relatives, they can also be linked by marriage. 13 These two particular features are important because they reveal that the heritage has, as it were, its own objective interest, which strongly impacts upon the shaping of social relationships, on individual and familial orientations and plans – and which thus, according to my hypothesis, also has an effect on familial memory processes. The institution of the Bäisaz, in other words, the taking in of an heir into a “house”, shows the close bond, denied by Halbwachs, between the interests of the “land” and the kinship relations within the family. Since this bond is essential to the family, it is also so for its memories. In addition, this example brings attention to the fact that the “family” can exhibit a variety of compositions – an issue that has hardly been addressed in the field of memory research up until now. The concept of the family has been barely discussed on a fundamental level; it is only recently, since so-called patchwork families are increasingly becoming the norm, that the question of how the object of investigation should actually be defined has become virulent (cf. Wagener, in this volume). However, most of the empirical studies on the topic of “family memory” neglect to ask the question of what is to be understood under “family”. Angela Keppler, for example, talks of “today’s families” (Keppler 1994: 25) in her study on family dinner table conversations. Although the “extended family” has in no way become extinct or irrelevant, as demonstrated by new research conducted in the field of family sociology14, it is, as a rule, small families (parents and their children) that are the objects of analysis. Alongside Keppler, the study of young Swiss married couples by Josette Coenen-Huther should be mentioned here.15 The situation is somewhat different in the French research field.16 A recent German-French pro-

13 Cf. Lévi-Strauss, op. cit. 1991. 435. When the word “house” refers to this social entity in the following sections, it will be written in quotes. 14 Cf. for example, Bonvalet (2003) on the “extended family circle”; see also AttiasDonfut, Lapierre & Segalen 2002; Brossard & Cambrézy 2009; cf. in this context Hareven (1977) on “family time”. 15 The same is also true for psychological or socio-psychological studies; cf. Remer et al. 1998. 16 See, for example, contributions in Lemieux & Gagnon 2007; cf. also Attias-Donfut & Wolff, 2005; Zonabend 1980, Le Wita 1991; Segalen & Michelat 1991; cf. also Muxel in this publication.

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ject, in which researchers from different disciplines used an expanded definition of the term “family”, should also be mentioned here. They drew upon an established ethnological distinction, namely on the difference between lignée (“line of descent”) and maisonnée (“household”) as it has been elaborated by Florence Weber (2002). Here too, however, the focus of the research was the young nuclear family that is, according to the researchers, newly confronted with the problem of forming its own family identity. 17 In the case of the farmer families that I studied, the participants are not nuclear families, but rather complicated composite families that are in a state of flux, but that for the most part still correspond to traditional patterns. One of these families (comprised of three generations living together in one household) is composed in the following way (see diagram 1): The first generation, born in the period between the wars, consists of a group of siblings, one man and two women, all three of whom remained unmarried and worked on their parents’ farm. The second generation is made up of a married couple. The man is a nephew (a sister’s son) of the three siblings, and came to live as a Bäisaz in the house of his uncle and his aunts (Monni and Tata) in his early twenties. Before that, he had lived with his parents, who were also farmers, in a neighbouring village. Diagram 1: Extended family

His wife, a farmer’s daughter from another area of Luxembourg, is called Schnauer, i.e. daughter-in-law, even though neither her husband’s father nor mother live in the house. The status of Schnauer is thus conceived in terms of the relationship to the “house” and not necessarily to particular affinal relatives, namely the parents-in-law. Finally, the third generation consists of the married

17 See Gollac & Oeser 2011. Cf. also historical and anthropological studies on particular social groups: Zonabend 1980, De Wita 1984; on sibling relationships, see Favart 2007.

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couple’s daughter and son, both of whom have finished university. The son is meant to take over the farm. The case of this family demonstrates that relations of filiation between the generations do not necessarily exist; the kinship relations in question are partly just of a collateral nature: uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces. Here it becomes obvious that the “house” as a centre of life which comprises property and family, is at the heart of rural inheritance and marital strategies and that the domestic kinship groups, or families, pragmatically adapt themselves to its requirements; even at the cost of many of its members having to remain unmarried. Halbwachs’ illustration of the link between land and family in the farming realm would not do justice to the situation in Luxembourg: “[...] un paysan ... distingue les maisons et les champs d’après la famille qui les possède et dit: ceci est l’enclos d’un tel, la ferme d’un tel [...”] (ibid.: 15)18. One could say that the situation in Luxembourg is just the opposite: the individual is identified through his or her belonging to a “house”. This being so, it was – and in many cases, still is – the name of the house which served as the primary point of reference for a person’s identification, and not the family name. We are thus dealing with a variety of the sociological type described by Lévi-Strauss and others as the “house society”.19 Family constellations like the one described are still perceived as “normal”, in other words, as plausible social entities, even if they are gradually becoming exceptions. While the young farmers in the grandchildren generation explain that today only those who can boast a proper professional training in agriculture can claim a place on the farm, they are still familiar with the idea of the unmarried uncle who didn’t study anything and just stays at the house as a labourer. Even in the cases where there is no uncle (Monni) or aunt (Tata) “at the house” anymore, they still belong to the familial memory. And the memory of them comprises an idea of the “house”, of the link between family (kinship) and property.

18 “... a farmer ... distinguishes the houses and fields according to the family that owns them and says, this is that one’s land, that one’s farm ...”. 19 It is not possible to engage in a deep discussion of the Luxembourgian model as compared to other “house societies” in this article; following Augustins’ characterisation of the Lotharingian situation, it can be described as an intermediate type between the “classical house society”, as is (was) the case in the Pyrenees, and genealogical kinship systems (Augustins 1986). On “house societies” in general, see Levi-Strauss 1991; Howell 2003 provides a summary of the debates on the categories of the “house society”; see also Hardenberg 2007; on European farming societies, cf. Bourdieu 1962; on the maisonnée concept, see Weber 2002.

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T WO L UXEMBOURGIAN F ARMER F AMILIES The following section will present the cases of two families and their farming operations which seem to resemble each other in important aspects if one looks at the starting situation of both of the representatives of the first generation. In addition, their development is also comparable, due to the fact that they are both characterised by continual growth and modernisation. They are further similar in that, in both cases, the third generation is still active in the farming business. In spite of these commonalities, they provide very different individual and familial narrations. In my presentation of the two families, I will focus on the male representatives of the three generations. This limitation is motivated by the fact that the men’s narratives are more clearly shaped by the idea of succession and predecessor-ship in the farming-businesses, and therefore also by the relationship to the farming property, than those of the women who were also interviewed. 20 The two families should not be understood as “typical” representatives of Luxembourgian farmer families. Indeed, they are rather special cases in some respects. However, these examples are revealing with regard to the issues that I would like to highlight precisely because certain aspects are brought more to the fore than in other cases. Family A A key phrase in the narration of A1, the seventy-three-year-old grandfather of family A, was: “Ech konnt nëmmen kleng fueren”; in English, approximately: “I couldn’t make any great leaps forward”.21 This sentence came up several times

20 It was left up to the families to decide if both partners would do an individual interview, or if only one representative from the first and second generation, respectively, would be interviewed. The predominance of male interviewees (28 men versus 17 women) can partly be explained by the fact that the topic “socio-economic change in the agricultural field” was associated with technological developments and processes of modernisation and therefore, with male expertise. The fact that women were the actual heirs to the farm in many of the families demonstrates that the predominance of men provides no evidence regarding women’s roles in the respective families and businesses. 21 The interviews were held in Luxembourgish and transcribed in full; the following transcription conventions were employed: (...) = pause; ... = cut-off sentence; [...] =

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during the interview and appears to describe most pertinently the development possibilities of A1 and his family and their potential for shaping their lives. Their limitations were caused by family circumstances. Although the parental farm was to be inherited by the older brother, A1 “stayed at home”, in other words, he lived as a labourer at the farm. It was out of the question for him, or for anyone, to learn a trade. According to family plans, A1 was supposed to occupy the role of Bäisaz in the house of a childless uncle whose farming business he operated together with his brother and father alongside their own familial enterprise. A1 was thus expected to inherit and to continue his uncle’s farm. The latter changed his mind however, and instead leased out his business, only to finally leave it to his nephew a few years later when it had become much smaller due to the sale of parts of the land. Diagram 2: Family A

The young farmer’s economic circumstances were therefore modest. There was, however, another reason for why he had to “make small steps” (kleng fueren). Both he and his wife came from outside of the village, and his uncle had been a stranger to the village as well since he had also first moved to the place as a Bäisaz when he was already an adult. This state of non-belonging in the village was above all experienced as a disadvantage when it came to the purchase of additional land. In the case of farm abandonment, instances of which increased in the 1960s and 70s, the established farmer families divided the land between themselves and, in doing so, hindered the development of his operation. A1 was only able to enlarge the farm slowly and to a limited extent; he therefore considered leasing out the farm at the earliest possible date, in other words, when he reached the prescribed retirement age of fifty-five. The family situation

omitted text; [xxx] = author’s comment. The subsequent interview quotations have been translated by the author.

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was such that it spoke in favour of such a plan: A1 didn’t have a male heir and his three daughters had all decided to pursue career training outside of the field of agriculture. However, things ended up differently than planned when a son-inlaw who was ready to take over the farm married into the family. A1 formally transferred the business over to his son-in-law, the Eidam, when he was only in his mid-forties. Looking back at this decision, he again describes his scope for action as having been extremely constricted; he explains that, basically, he was not asked for his opinion about it. Nevertheless, reflecting back on his life and how it turned out given the circumstances, A1 sees it as having been meaningful; meaningful in regards to the development of the business and to the more comprehensive family history: “And so it was still good that I did come here, that I could make my life here, even though we couldn’t make any great leaps forward.”22 The opportunities of the son-in-law, A2, were limited as well, and this was also due to the rural family circumstances. A2, born in 1957, did not complete any career training, even though a brother, and not he, was in line to inherit the farm. He instead “stayed at home”, just like his father-in-law. According to his own account, his path in life was determined by happenstance, namely, the meeting of his future wife, a farmer’s daughter: One of my brothers stayed at home. So I didn’t have a choice. And then I met this one here [his wife]. In the beginning we wanted, we weren’t even supposed to become farmers, and I went to work. And then my father-in-law was going to modernise the farm, and I said, “Yes, I’ll help”. And then we went into the city to get our subsidy, and then they asked me how would I like to take over the business, because he [the father-in-law] was already 45 years old. […] And that’s why I became a farmer again.23 Like his father-in-law, A2 describes a development determined by outside factors that were more or less unforeseeable. In the above citation, he gives an ac-

22 “An do war et jo awer gutt datt ech awer heihinner komm sinn, datt ech mäi Liewe konnt machen, och wa mer ganz kleng gefuer sinn.” 23 “‘T ass ee vu menge Bridder doheem bliwwen. Do hat ech jo d’Wiel net. Jo. An dunn hunn ech hatt hei kënnegeléiert. An am Ufank wollte mer, sollte mir jo och guer net Bauer ginn. An du sinn ech schaffe gaangen an du wéi, du sollt de Schwéierpapp dann du moderniséieren, an ech hu gesot, jo ech hëllefen, an du si mer dann du an d’Stad gaangen fir eise Subzid ze kréien, an du hunn déi mer virgeschloen, wann ech géif de Betrib huelen, well hien hat du 45 Joer […] An dofir sinn ech du rem Bauer ginn.”

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count of how the responsible government agency made him a subsidy beneficiary and thereby the head of the enterprise, i.e. a farmer. The situation of A3, the son born in 1982 (A1’s grandson) presents itself quite differently. In his case, the decisive factor was not the family circumstances, but rather the fact that he had learned a profession, or more precisely, that he had completed a degree in agriculture. He says the following of himself: “… I have my job, and I have my life and I also have my private life.”24 During the family discussion, he underscores how it is different now compared to in the past when a farmer didn’t necessarily have to study, whereas now, one definitely needs a degree. Today, the farm on which the three men live and work together is a modern business, one of the two that remain in the village. A3 has not formally taken over the business yet, but already acts as junior manager. During the family discussions, he is the dominant narrator and interpreter of the farm’s development, both of the past and of the future, while his father and grandfather are almost completely silent. In contrast to the latter two, A3 presents himself as master of his own destiny. In his view, an education and a profession are not only preconditions for the continuance of the family business, but are also qualities which make him into an independent person in a world which extends beyond the narrow framework of farm and village. His education enables him to lay claim to a “private life”, to consider farming work to be a job like any other that he can leave behind him when he leaves the stall in the evening. Family B At first glance, the grandfather in Family B, B1, born in 1922, has a lot in common with grandfather A. He had older brothers, as did the latter, so he couldn’t realistically hope to inherit the farm. Moreover, he also didn’t have a professional degree and instead stayed on the parental farm as a working family member. Nevertheless, grandfather B represents the exact opposite of grandfather A in many ways: he didn’t have to operate on a small scale (kleng fueren) but was instead in a position to make rather significant leaps forward. He describes his life as being characterised by determined and meaningful progress in a world in which he always had his place, and under conditions favourable to his needs. The focus of B1’s narrative is his depiction of his family of origin and the family business. His professional background and the later development of his own agricultural enterprise are parts of this broader history. On the one hand, he

24 “... ech hu mäi Beruff, an ech hu mäi Liewen, an ech hunn och mäi Privatliewen.”

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describes his close integration into the family as a form of constraint and as a duty. He had to leave the agricultural school at the age of 14 after just one year, and even though he would have liked to continue studying, because he was needed to work on the parental farm. At the same time, however, he views this firm embeddedness in the family as a strength and as the actual foundation for economic and social success, both his own and that of his eight siblings. And in general, it was the case, […] that there were some people in every house who weren’t married, […] then they were “aunt at the house” and “uncle at the house”. At our house, we were nine children […] and no one stayed behind as the uncle or aunt, but we all worked together from childhood on.25 Although he and his siblings had to work at home, in their case this did not result in them having to renounce their own independent life, economic success or family fulfilment. B1 regrets the fact that they were by and large refused school education; and he reproaches his father for that. However, at the same time he sees this restriction as having been the foundation for the remarkable occupational and economic accomplishments made by the nine children, respectively. They were all more successful in their later lives than they ever could have been with a formal education – a truth that, according to him, is demonstrated by the fact that all of his friends who attended school longer than he did later failed as farmers. B1 is convinced that the siblings’ individual successes in agriculture as well as in other economic sectors were not based on their education, but rather on the forces generated out of their pronounced family cohesion; “we were strong because we all kept together.”26 The father and his children were able to jointly acquire a second, large farm – the farm where B1 and his wife took up residence right after their marriage – with the proceeds from the sale of a dairy factory founded by the family before the Second World War. The strength drawn from this family cohesion had a moral dimension as well, in that it granted them the necessary confidence to make a brand new start on a run-down farm, for example. Thus, in a broad sense, the family helped B1 to achieve that to which he had aspired since childhood, “I have always […] I always wanted to be on a farm.”27 25 “An, am allgemengen war et datt an all Haus […] da waren der e puer déi net bestued waren [...] déi waren dann Tatta beim Haus, oder Monni beim Haus. A bei eis war et esou, mir waren zu néng Kanner (...) an’t ass kee fir Monni an Tatta bliwwen, awer mir hunn all zesumme geschafft vu klengem un.” 26 “... mir waren staark well mer all zesumme gehalen hunn.” 27 “Ech hunn ëmmer schonn […] ech wollt ëmmer op engem Haff sinn.”

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Diagram 3: Family B

The memories of this large and solidary family also affect the narrative of the son, B2, born in 1957. He describes the success of his paternal family and specifies what the foundations for this success were: cohesion, hard work and, lastly, what he seemed to consider most important, intelligence. [T]hey [the members of the father’s family] were always able to manage it because there were many of them, but they all got along well with each other. They worked like crazy and were intelligent too. They were really intelligent. […] they all really worked their way up extraordinarily well, because they thought about it and were hard workers.28 It appears as if B2 has taken over the legacy of his father and paternal relatives, since the farm that he now manages has been consistently developed and diversified; today, alongside milk production and cattle farming, he also operates a large riding stable. He explicitly links this positive business development and his own entrepreneurship to the family tradition of cohesion. For B2, this paternal legacy is also a foundation for future developments. He has tried to convey to his two school-age sons that the collaborative continuation of the business is a way of life and work that is worthwhile in many respects – alas, without much success. The older son, after briefly attending farming school, decided against working in agriculture which he found not to be lucrative enough, and, in doing so, he decided against a common future with his brother (and father). Moreover, B2 can in no way be sure that his second son, a 15-yearold, will stick to the plan of becoming a farmer:

28 “... si [the father’s family members] hunn et ëmmer rëm fäerdeg bruecht doduerger datt si zu vill waren, awer eens ze ginn, si hu geschafft wéi déi verréckt, an, an si waren och intelligent. Si ware wierklech intelligent [...] si hunn alleguerten sech immens gutt eropgeschafft well se eben gutt geduecht hunn a fläisseg waren.”

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Yes, if the second one gets the idea to suddenly say, “Nah, it’s easier for me to become a bus driver [laughs], then we’ll sell the whole shop here and then we’ll be doing well.” But that is very often the end of the song. Very often. 29 The business’ distant future is thus uncertain. In contrast, B2 himself knew from a very early age what his future should look like, as did his father before him, “Well, I was always sure that I wanted to stay at home and become a farmer.”30 Unlike the earlier generations, he completed modern professional training even though he does not attribute much importance to school and university education, resembling his father also in this respect. He explains that while he didn’t exhibit any particular talents in school he grew with the responsibilities on the farm, whereas others who studied and attained important positions haven’t achieved very much. However, B2 also clearly states that his situation is no longer comparable to that of his father and the older generation. For, while in the 50s and 60s everything was possible and promising, today one can fail in spite of intelligence, hard work and creativity. Given the unpredictability of the economic situation, planning is only possible today on a very limited scale. B3, the younger of the two sons (or grandsons) was born in 1994 and just recently began his training at an agricultural vocational school. He assumes that he will inherit the family business, as his father inherited it from the grandfather. He explains that he enjoys harvest work and caring for the livestock and that he is happy to be able to help his father. B3 is familiar with the family history and knows, for example, about his great-grandfather who founded a dairy factory and who had been able to buy a farm for the grandfather. However, his ideas about the future seem to be barely influenced by family tradition, i.e. by the qualities and values that are so important to the grandfather and father, since they see in them the foundation for the individual and communal achievements that distinguish the family. These brief presentations clearly demonstrate that Families A and B produce narratives that greatly differ from one another. While the grandfather and father in Family A tell about the traditional relationships in the family and village, and, in each case, see their own life paths as having been significantly determined by these relationships, the grandson (or son) gives an account of the transformation which has since occurred. His life is no longer determined by the family, or by 29 “Jo wann deen zweeten elo och nach op d’Iddi kënnt e beemol ze soen, nee’t ass méi einfach wann ech ginn op de Bus, [laughs] hein, an da verkafe mer de ganze Buttek hei an da geet et eis gutt. Mee dat ass ganz oft d’Enn vum Lidd. Ganz oft.” 30 “Also fir mech war ëmmer kloer, heiheem ze bleiwen an Bauer ze sinn.”

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the demands of the “house”, but rather by the fact that he has a profession that makes him independent, that, for instance, allows him to have a private life. The three generations thus appear to comply with the general development toward individualisation and the biographisation of life.31 The discussions with B1 and B2 on the other hand were predominantly focused on the family itself, the particular family spirit and the qualities or gifts with which the members are endowed by the family. In this case, it is these gifts – intelligence, hard-work and a sense of family – which constitute the foundation for individual and communal success and independence. B2 feels an obligation toward those values and beliefs which are presented to him in the story of his father and his paternal family. He even projects them onto the future, when he imagines how his sons could later continue the business together. At the same time however, he evokes the dreadful scenario of his son becoming a bus driver, which would be the antitype, so to speak, of his enterprising ancestors. In doing so, he reveals that the family spirit is on the wane and that his expectations for the future are giving way to apprehensions.32 While the members of Family A together produce a narrative that interprets their own story as change towards greater biographical openness, Family B presents a more complex and, in some respects, an opposing picture: the first generation representative describes himself as being in accordance with the family spirit as a self-aware actor in an ongoing and meaningful development process, while his son is trapped in a present-day situation that is defined by worries about the future and in which he is looking to the family’s past for orientation.

31 Under closer observation, however, one can also interpret their narratives in almost the opposite way: the grandfather and father were confronted with great existential openness and uncertainty in their lives, and were to a large extent coerced into flexibility and mobility and into making life-planning decisions. In contrast to this, the life of the son or of the uncle, respectively, is progressing along firmly established ground; to a large extent it is determined by the initial socio-economic situation, the flourishing family business and his formal education, which came out of his family situation as a matter of course, more or less. For a more extensive analysis of this aspect, see Boesen 2011; cf. also Bertaux & Bertaux-Wiame 1988:17. 32 In this regard, cf. Sennett’s notion of “apprehension” (Sennett, 1998:97). Using Koselleck’s categories here, one can also make note of a strict rupture between the “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation”, since the experience of linear development and progress that B2 is given in the form of his family history, no longer serves him as a foundation upon which he can plan his future (Koselleck, 1989, p. 349 et seq.); see also Giesen (2004) on “divided memories”.

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In the present article, I will not deal with the question whether the biographical narratives of the men presented here provide information about their actions, their biographical options – their “agency”. Nor will I discuss to what extent the narrations themselves and the narrative competency of those in question are a foundation for agency.33 This article focuses on another aspect of family memory, namely on its link to more encompassing familial transmission processes. The following section will analyse how the “inheritance” passed on through the family has influenced individual life paths, or, respectively, how this is presented in the self-narratives.

F AMILY T RANSMISSION P ROCESSES The word “inheritance” does not only refer to material goods here, but also to cultural and social resources. In the present case, the transmission of material possessions, or more precisely, of the house and farm, is indeed of particular importance. However, these goods, possibly even more so than other material legacies, are as it were imbued with immaterial values. 34 The analytical distinction between material, cultural and social heritage would, in any case, not be adequate to the processes of inheritance observed in the families that I have investigated.35 A further correlation between the two families, that has not been highlighted, is that the first generation showed a high degree of spatial mobility – a phenomenon that is not a matter-of-course in farmer circles, except for matrimonial mobility. In both cases, the house, as the family’s physical and social space, was initially occupied by the first generation’s married couple.36 This means that no

33 I have analysed the same material with regard to questions of agency and narrativity elsewhere; see Boesen 2011. These issues are intensively discussed in the context of recent debates on individualisation, in connection with the notion of “choice-” or “doit-yourself biography”, i.a. in youth sociology research; cf. for example, Brannen 2002; Furlong & Cartmel 1997. Regarding debates on narrativity, see, among others, Krauss 2002; Strawson 2008; on the question of “narrative identity” in a general sense, see Echterhoff & Straub 2003/4. 34 Cf. Muxel 1996, p. 153 et seq.; Attias-Donfut et al., op. cit., p. 65 et seq.; see also Mauss on the spiritual force inherent in the gift in general (Mauss 1950). 35 Cf. Bertaux & Bertaux-Wiame, op.cit, p. 14 et seq. 36 One aspect that cannot be dealt with here but for which the comparison of the two families also promises to be interesting, is the question regarding the conditions under

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“house”, in the above mentioned sense of a unity of family and business, existed in either case that would have “determined” the grandfather’s life path. Or, to put it another way, for A1 or B1, there was no “house” that would have called for an heir. What was lacking was the positive détermination, as it is termed by Daniel and Isabelle Bertaux, that ensues from the heritage: Quand nous disons donc qu’une génération ascendante peut fort bien, à travers ce qu’elle transmet, “déterminer” la formation des trajectoires des générations futures, nous ne donnons pas au terme de détermination le contenu de contrainte; mais plutôt celui d’une ressource désirable, susceptible, parce que désirable, d’engendrer un comportement prévisible (Bertaux & Bertaux-Wiame 1988).37

It is precisely this particularity that makes these two families interesting for my investigation; namely, the lack of détermination which stems from the heritage, or, to be more accurate, the fact that this détermination is – for different reasons in the two cases – specifically weak. First, A1 had to renounce his right to the parental inheritance that instead went to a brother; then he was rebuffed a second time when the childless uncle, whose farm he was supposed to take over, rejected the principle of property preservation and transmission within the family. After an agreement had already been reached at an early stage that A1 would receive the collateral inheritance, which therefore appeared to predetermine his future, he was then suddenly confronted with total existential openness as an adult. It is no wonder that his narrative is clearly affected by this early life experience; A1 depicts later phases of his life as also being characterized by ups and downs and as more or less removed from his planning influence. The interesting question here is whether he was able to make this difficult inheritance his own, an inheritance that was not only deficient in size, but also in its spiritual and moral quality. Although he modernised and expanded the farming enterprise to a certain degree, his portrayal is altogether determined by the instance of limitation or deficiency: he was only able to make small steps, had to be satisfied with a marginal position in the local farming community, and did not himself produce an heir for the farm. Instead of transforming the inheritance and thereby appropriating it, A1 holds to its original characteristics, its both material and moral defi-

which autochthony constitutes a capital. On the problem of “capital d’autochtonie”, see Renahy 2006; Retière 2003. 37 See also Bertaux-Wiame 1993; on the “appropriation de l’héritier par l’héritage” cf. also Bourdieu 2003: 219.

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ciencies.38 Commitment to the inheritance and a more or less clear identification with the “house” – “And then it was still good, that I did after all end up coming here [...]” – is only possible in a mediated way, namely by considering his grandsons’ plans and his confidence about the future, a confidence that, retrospectively, lends meaning to his own active life.39 A2’s starting situation resembles that of his father-in-law in that he also “had not studied anything” and stayed on the parental farm as a labourer although he could not inherit it. Another analogy is that the inheritance that he eventually took over did not fall to him directly; he only attained the farm through matrimonial relations, in other words, as a husband who married into the “house”. A further parallel that can be observed is that the legacy’s or the “house’s” call for an heir was quite weak here as well: A2 and his wife “weren’t supposed to become farmers at all in the beginning [...]”. His commitment to the business turns out to be as uncertain as the call for him to become the heir was weak. A2 didn’t have any aspirations of his own; he was only there in order to support his fatherin-law. In the end, his transformation into the heir did not happen because of the demands or possibilities given by the “house” but due to the intervention of public administration. If one follows A2’s portrayal of events, an external instance had to intervene in the family’s destiny in order to provide the suprapersonal, determinative force to the situation that the heritage itself lacked. As already pointed out above, the situation of A3, who will take over a large modern farm from his father, is completely different. Notably however, this inheritance is left unmentioned, more or less, in the interview with him. Instead of talking about his own business, he speaks mostly about how the general prerequisites for being a farmer have changed. Unlike in times past, today, the inheritance relationship is not a sufficient basis for taking this life path, it is also important to obtain qualifications and degrees. For A3, an education and a profession signify personal independence. His educational development is proof of his professional ability and represents, as it were, the objective foundation of his future planning that is independent from the family circumstances. A3 contrasts the détermination given by the inheritance with his individual, professional identity and thereby with a particular ethos; an ethos that implies commitment on the one hand, but a separation of profession and person on the

38 On the necessity of a transformation of inheritance, Bertaux & Bertaux-Wiame, op. cit.; cf. also Boesen & Scuto 2011. 39 The lack that A1 felt as the receiver of an inheritance is reversed to a certain extent by the act of giving to the following generations; cf. in this regard, Bloch & Buisson 1994.

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other. His account made it also clear however, that today, in the face of the enormous value appreciation of land and real estate, inheritance requires this form of legitimation. The siblings’ broad relinquishment of their share in the inheritance is no longer a matter-of-course as it was in the past which means that any claim to the inheritance must be founded upon an explicit commitment to farming work. 40 However, by relativising the family’s influence on his development, A3 is also following the example of both preceding generations to a certain degree. What in the case of the father and grandfather went back to a deficiency, in other words, to the fact that they were not vested with an inheritance, is in his case based on professional qualifications and independence. The objective justification for A3’s entry into the family enterprise simultaneously provides legitimation for the more or less precarious inheritances which both preceding generations had accepted. As established above, in Family B’s case, there is also no “house” in the conventional sense of which the first generation would have been the inheritors. However, while Family A’s “house” was to some extent abandoned as a reproductive unit due to decisions made by the uncle – in other words, because of the sale of part of the farmland – in Family B’s case, one could speak of the uncommon broadening and associated disintegration of the socio-economic organisational structure of the “house”. Through his inheritance of the second farm that had been communally acquired by his parents and the sibling group, B1 becomes an economically successful farmer who is independent from the family business. As he expressed in the interview, he decided to be autonomous and to make a completely fresh start instead of being integrated into the parental farming business, even if this decision produced exceptional demands of him and his wife, above all an openness to risk. B1 describes the first years as being a kind of pioneering time during which the dilapidated estate had to be made habitable and the business had to be put into operation. Thus, a very elementary form of inheritance “appropriation” occurred in his case; and yet, as already pointed out above, B1’s narrative is above all concerned with his family of origin, or more precisely, with the joint accomplishments of the father and the siblings and with the family spirit that made their successes possible. In the framework of this entire story, the farm that he himself ran successfully appears as a kind of satellite of the original family business.

40 This commitment is legally binding for a certain length of time; see Art. 5 of the Loi du 9 Juillet 1969 ayant pour objet de modifier et de completer les articles 815, 832, 866, 2103(3) et 2109 du Code Civil.

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As a matter of fact, the property which was passed to B1 does not represent a case of filial inheritance in the strict sense, since it is above all the result of the economic efforts of the sibling group. B1 cannot or does not want to make this joint effort go forgotten by underlining his own accomplishments; instead he holds onto it as the actual expression of the qualities that are characteristic of the family. In other words, his narrative is predominantly about the spiritual or cultural inheritance towards which he feels an obligation and which he was able to preserve in his economic and familial dealings. In contrast to Family A’s second generation, B2 is able to take over the parental business. He also inherits the family legacy in a more comprehensive sense, in that he identifies with the paternal lineage, with the abilities and, in particular, with the intelligence evinced by his forebears. The progressive modernisation and diversification of the business seem to leave no doubt that B2 also “earned” the inheritance that fell to him, that he made the farm his own. During the discussion however, it becomes clear that the inheritance is unsecured in many respects. Apart from the fact that the family’s entrepreneurial spirit is limited by crisis-driven developments in the field of agricultural production, something which the parents did not experience during their time, the underlying economic process of appropriation, as it is summarized by B2 at the end of the conversation, is also leading them into a highly precarious situation. B2 already agreed on a financial settlement with his siblings, i.e., he purchased the agricultural land that they had inherited – a necessary step that A3 still has to accomplish. However, B2 explains that the independence gained by taking this step was bought at a high price: he now finds himself in a vicious circle in which new investments are accompanied by an accumulation of debt.41 A further uncertainty concerns the next generation and their willingness to continue the family legacy. B2 clarifies right at the beginning of the conversation that the spirit that motivated the paternal ancestors was barely alive anymore in the young people since they already have everything. While A2 can consider his own problematic inheritance situation to be overcome in the relationship with his son, B2, on the other hand, has to worry that his endeavours, which were supposed to enable him to both continue the family legacy and obtain independence, could ultimately have been in vain.

41 “... da bass de an engem Zahnrad do dran, du méchs Schold, du investéiers, du mechs Schold, du investéiers.”

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C ONCLUSION My objective was to enquire into the influence of familial transmission processes on family memory. Two families were used as examples to demonstrate how the individual narratives and the communally produced family memory can be understood as commentaries on these processes. Furthermore, it also became clear that inheritance has a formative influence on the individual and his or her life plans; the family is therefore more than an identity resource that can be accessed when necessary.42 The example of these two families also illustrates that the intergenerational transmission processes in question are not only formative in a descending line, but that they also have effects in the opposite direction. As demonstrated by the case of A1, the grandfather in the first example family, the perception of one’s own appropriation efforts, i.e., one’s personal contribution to the preservation of the suprapersonal and supragenerational legacy, is to no small extent determined by how the subsequent generations proceed, in other words, whether or not it is possible to pass on the legacy to them. One could argue that the analysis of these kinds of complex familial transmission processes enhances the understanding of the dynamics of biographical self-interpretation, and that this is also the case with research on social milieus in which the legacy does not have an objective manifestation comparable to that of the “house”.43 The particular value of the analysis of farmer families is that it accentuates these connections and by doing so also draws attention to the middle-class bias that characterises family research in general. Moreover, my objective was to provide a contribution to the discussion on methodological and conceptual issues and to use the example of the farming milieu to point out the significance of particular social and cultural conditions and development processes for familial transmission processes. The interpretation of the individual memories and of the family discussion as “commentaries on the family legacy” is not only based on the interview texts, but also on particular historical and ethnographic knowledge, in other words, on a specific hermeneutic pre-understanding. The work conducted by the LUX-ID research group, which consisted largely of the collaborative interpretation of interview texts, made the significance of

42 See, for example, Segalen 1993; cf. also Ziegler 2000; Leccardi & Ruspini 2006; Attias-Donfut et al. 2002. 43 In this regard, cf. Ziegler’s study on “social inheritance”, a term which designates “…every process of transmission which takes place within a family.” (Ziegler 2000; esp. pp. 56 et seq.).

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these foundations of comprehension especially clear. 44 For example, in the case of A3’s remarks on education and occupation, the majority of the analysers recognized expressions of individualism, self-determination, liberation from family influence, etc. and interpreted this as a reflection of the general social discourse on education and personal self-realisation. These links cannot be denied; however, as I tried to demonstrate, A3’s narrative must also be interpreted in a completely different way, namely as a part of a more comprehensive family history that fulfils a function of legitimation in both a forward and backward-looking way. The accomplishments and positive qualities highlighted in A3’s narrative, namely his professional training and job competence, do not only act as a belated compensation for the inadequate inheritance that both of the older men had to accept, but are also a way of appropriating his legacy. These qualities constitute a justification of the privilege that A3, as the inheritor of the farm, enjoys, in contrast to his siblings, since they will relinquish their claim to certain parts of the inheritance.

R EFERENCES Augustins, Georges (1986): Comment se perpétuer? Devenir des lignées et destins des patrimoines dans les paysanneries européennes. Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie. Assmann, Jan (1992): Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. München: Beck. – (1988): Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität. In: Assmann, Jan & Tonio Hölscher (Hg.): Kultur und Gedächtnis, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Attias-Donfut, Claudine, Nicole Lapierre & Martine Segalen (2002): Le nouvel esprit de famille. Paris: Jacob. Attias-Donfut, Claudine & François-Charles Wolff (2005): Generational Memory and Family Relationships. In: Johnson, Malcolm L.: The Cambridge Handbook of Age and Aging. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; pp. 443-454. Beck, Ulrich & Elisabeth Beck-Gernheim (1993): Nicht Autonomie, sondern Bastelbiographie. Anmerkungen zur Individualisierungsdiskussion am Beispiel des Aufsatzes Günter Burkart. Zeitschrift für Soziologie 22(3): 178187.

44 On the practice of “hermeneutic dialogue analysis” cf. Jensen 2000.

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Bertaux, Daniel & Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame (1988): Le patrimoine et sa lignée: transmissions et mobilité sociale sur cinq générations. Life Stories/Récits de vie 4: 8-25. Bertaux-Wiame, Isabelle (1993): The Pull of Family Ties. Intergenerational Relationships and Life Paths. In: Bertaux, Daniel & Paul Thompson (Eds.): Family Models, Myths & Memories. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers; pp. 39-50. Bloch, Françoise & Monique Buisson (1994): La circulation du don. Communications 59: 55-7. Boesen, Elisabeth (2011): Lebensplanung und Familiengeschick. Soziale Transformationsprozesse und familiäre Tradierung bei luxemburgischen Bauern. In: Kroh, Jens & Sophie Neuenkirch (Hg.): Erzählte Zukunft. Zur inter- und intragenerationellen Aushandlung von Erwartungen. Göttingen: Wallstein; pp. 95-115. Boesen, Elisabeth & Denis Scuto (2011): Historical Testimony and Social Transformation. On Memory Processes in Farmer and Steel Worker Families in Luxembourg. Journal of Comparative Family Studies (Special Issue: Families and Memories: Continuity and Social Change) 42(3): 339-353. Bonvalet, Catherine (2003): The Local Family Circle. Populations 59: 9-42. Bourdieu, Pierre (2003): Méditations pascaliennes. Paris: Seuil. Brannen, Julia et al. (2002): Young Europeans, Work and Family. Futures in Transition. London: Routledge. Coenen-Huther, Josette (1994): La mémoire familiale. Paris: L’Harmattan. Echterhoff, Gerald & Jürgen Straub (2003/2004): Narrative Psychologie. Handlung, Kultur, Interpretation. Zeitschrift für Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften 11/12. Erll, Astrid (2011): Locating Family in Cultural Memory Studies. Journal of Comparative Family Studies (Special Issue: Families and Memories. Continuity and Social Change) 42(3): 303-318. – (2005): Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen. Eine Einführung. Stuttgart: Metzler. Favart, Evelyne (2007): Mémoire familiale et fratries: les liens fraternels à l’épreuve du temps. Enfances, Familles, Générations 7. http://id.erudit.org/ iderudit/017786ar. François, Etienne & Hagen Schulze (Hg.) (2001): Deutsche Erinnerungsorte. Bd. I-III. München: Beck. Furlong, Andy & Fred Cartmel (1997): Young People and Social Change. Individualization and Risk in Late Modernity. Buckingham: McGraw-Hill/Open University Press.

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Giesen, Bernhard (2004): Noncontemporaneity, Asynchronicity and Divided Memories. Time & Society 13(1): 27-40. Gollac, Sibylle & Alexandra Oeser (2011): Comparing Family Memories in France and Germany: The Production of History(ies) within and through Kin Relations. Journal of Comparative Family Studies (Special Issue on Families and Memories: Continuity and Change) 42(3): 385-397. Halbwachs, Maurice (1997[1950]) La mémoire collective. Paris: Michel. – (1994[1925]) Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Michel. – (1992[1950]): On Collective Memory. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hardenberg, Roland (2007): Das “einschließende Haus”. Wertehierarchien und das Konzept des “Hausgesellschaft” im interkulturellen Vergleich. Anthropos 102: 157-168. Hareven, Tamara (1977): Family Time and Historical Time. Daedalus 106(2): 57-70. Howell, Signe (2003): The House as Analytical Concept. In: Sparkes, Stephen & Signe Howell (Eds.): The House in Southeast Asia. A Changing Social, Economic, and Political Domain. London: RoutledgeCurzon; pp. 16-33. Jensen, Olaf (2000): Zur gemeinsamen Verfertigung von Text in der Forschungssituation. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research 1(2). http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/2-00/200jensen-d.htm. Keppler, Angela (1994): Tischgespräche. Über Formen der Vergemeinschaftung am Beispiel der Konversation in Familien. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Kmec, Sonja et al. (Éds./Hg.) (2007): Lieux de mémoire au Luxembourg / Erinnerungsorte in Luxemburg. Luxembourg: Éditions Saint-Paul. Koselleck, Reinhart (1989): Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Kraus, Wolfgang (2002): Falsche Freunde, Radikale Pluralisierung und der Ansatz einer narrativen Identität. In: Straub, Jürgen & Joachim Renn (Hg.): Transitorische Identität. Der Prozesscharakter des modernen Selbst. Frankfurt/M.: Campus; pp. 159-186. Leccardi, Carmen & Elisabetta Ruspini (Eds.): A New Youth? Young People, Generations and Family Life. Aldershot: Ashgate; pp. 1-11. Lenz, Claudia & Harald Welzer (2007): Opa in Europa. Erste Befunde einer vergleichenden Tradierungsforschung. In: Welzer, Harald & Christian Gudehus (Hg.): Der Krieg der Erinnerung. Holocaust, Kollaboration und Widerstand im europäischen Gedächtnis. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer; pp. 7-41.

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Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1991): Maison. In: Bonte, Pierre & Michel Izard (Éds.): Dictionnaire de l’ethnologie et de l’anthropologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France; pp. 434-436). Levy, Daniel & Natan Sznaider (2001): Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Le Wita, Beatrix (1991): L’énigme des trois générations. In: Segalen, Martine (Éd.): Jeux de familles. Paris: Presse du CNRS; pp. 209-218. – (1984): La mémoire familiale des Parisiens appartenant aux classes moyennes. Ethnologie française 14(1): 27-33. Mauss, Marcel (1923-24): Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés primitives. Année sociologique 1923-24: 30-186. Muxel, Anne (1995): Individu et mémoire familiale. Paris: Nathan. Nora, Pierre (1984-92) Les lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard. Oeser, Alexandra & Sibylle Gollac (2011): Comparing Family Memories in France and Germany. The Production of History(ies) within and through Kin Relations. Journal of Comparative Family Studies (Special Issue: Families and Memories: Continuity and Social Change) 3: 385-397. Remer, Rory et al. (1998): Family Members’ Agreement on Memories of Shared Experiences. Psychological Reports 82: 1195-1201. Renahy, Nicolas (2006): Les gars du coin. Enquête sur une jeunesse rurale. Paris: La Découverte. Retière, Joël (2003): Autour de l’autochtonie. Refléxions sur la notion de capital social populaire. Politix 16(3): 121-143. Segalen, Martine (1993): Die Tradierung des Familiengedächtnisses in den heutigen französischen Mittelschichten. In: Lüscher, Karl & Franz Schultheis (Hg.): Generationenbeziehungen in “postmodernen” Gesellschaften. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz; pp. 157-169. – (Éd.) (1991): Jeux de familles. Paris: Presse du CNRS Segalen, Martine & Claude Michelat (1991): L’amour de la généalogie. In: Segalen, Martine (Éd.): Jeux de familles. Paris: Presse du CNRS; pp. 193-208. Sennett, Richard (1998): The Corrosion of Character. The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: Norton Strawson, Galen (2008): Against Narrativity. In: Strawson, Galen: Real Materialism and Other Essays. Oxford: Clarendon; pp. 189-208. Weber, Florence (2002): Pour penser la parenté contemporaine. Maisonnée et parentèle, des outils de l’anthropologie. In: Debordeaux, Danièle & Pierre Strobel (Éds.): Les solidarités familiales en question: Entraide et transmission. Paris: LGDJ; pp. 73-106.

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Welzer, Harald, Sabine Moller & Karoline Tschuggnall (2002): “Opa war kein Nazi”. Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. Welzer, Harald (Hg.) (2007): Krieg der Erinnerung. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. Ziegler, Meinrad (2000): Das soziale Erbe. Eine soziologische Fallstudie über drei Generationen einer Familie. Wien: Böhlau. Zonabend, Françoise (1980): La mémoire longue. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Private, Semi-Public, Published Rural Autobiographies Within the Family and Beyond R ITA G ARSTENAUER

If we distinguish between Grand Narratives of the past and more peripheral forms of memory, I will rather concentrate on the periphery in this article. This periphery, however, does not go along with the dichotomy of private/nondiscursive and public/discursive memory. I will focus on a memory practice belonging neither to the official remembrance of major events, nor one that is entirely part of the realm of the intimate recollection of private experiences: the writing, circulating and reading of popular autobiography. It is the aim of this text to introduce the genre of popular autobiography, argue its discursive character, and suggest a modus operandi for approaching peripheral discourses. I will support my conceptual suggestions by presenting the empirical findings from a structural analysis of meta-data on a body of approximately 340 texts of rural autobiography that I performed in the course of my dissertation about the representation of the rural exodus in Austrian life narratives. These texts have been preserved at the Dokumentation lebensgeschichtlicher Aufzeichnungen (DOKU), the collection of biographical records at the University of Vienna.1

1

See Müller 2006.

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P OPULAR AUTOBIOGRAPHY : A G ENRE OF P RIVATE R ECOLLECTION OF L ITERARY P RODUCTION

AT THE

M ARGINS

Popular autobiography comprises autobiographical texts by authors that are neither famous nor professional writers; this laconic definition has wider implications. Unlike more intimate writing practices such as keeping a diary, an autobiography is usually directed towards an audience. For an author who is neither famous nor writing so skilfully as to enter the realm of canonical literature, capturing the attention of an audience for one’s own life story may seem presumptuous. In order to perform this act in a justified manner, there are various ways of maintaining the dignity of authorship2: Since it is mainly the elderly who sit down to write their autobiographies, seniority within a family or another close community may be such an argument; an extraordinary experience such as service or imprisonment during a war, or migration can be equally distinctive. In th rural autobiographies from 20 century Austria, the radical changes in the rural life world experienced by the authors are often mentioned as a motive for giving testimony. The authors feel they know about a lost past about which the younger generation does not but should. In some cases, a person’s social prestige in their local context is sufficient to justify them claiming autobiographical authorship. Furthermore, requests by potential readers may provide a motive, e.g. when grandchildren ask their grandparents to write down their life histories, or when institutions for adult education offer life writing workshops. 3 In Austria, requests for written life narratives from the academic field have been an important motivator for writers of popular autobiographies since the early 1980s. 4 There is a broad variety in the form and content of popular autobiographies. Often, autobiographical texts result from an initial attempt of commemorative biographical writing about parents, grandparents or other noteworthy family members, e.g. longstanding family servants. Sometimes, there are examples which mix the genres of family chronicle and autobiography. Beside those texts that locate the autobiographers within a collective portrait along with other family members, there are also autobiographical texts in a more narrow sense.

2 3

Warnecken 1988: 142 – 146. For autobiographic writing in adult education see Blaumeiser & Wappelshammer 1997.

4

From a European perspective, the practice of motivating autobiographical testimonies for social research has a longer tradition going back to Florian Znaniecki’s writing contests in the 1920s and 1930s. See Kohli 1981: 285; Warneken 1985; Becker 1986.

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Among them, we find shorter texts on childhood and youth, as well as booklength life accounts. A third variety goes beyond the individual or familycollective representation, by commemorating the past life world in general, often with an increased poetic aspiration. For this form of rural autobiography, a general description of the annual cycle of farming tasks enriched with individual childhood memories is typical.5 Finally, the requests from historians, folklorists or social scientists evoke yet another type of brief autobiographical text centred around a pre-determined topic, like mobility, Christmas customs or something similar. The earliest autobiographical texts at the collection of biographical records at th th the University of Vienna date back to the late 18 and early 19 century. The material and linguistic characteristics of the manuscripts thus range from handwritten texts in German longhand to recent electronic documents or computer printouts. Some of the popular autobiographies have been published as books and have been added to the collection as such, with no original manuscript available at the archive. In addition to differences in the script (German or Latin longhand, typescript or computer manuscript), there are differences in the types of paper, layout and language. The language used ranges from standard German to free phonetic transliterations of dialect both in prose and verse. In regards to the material appearance of the manuscripts, the makeshift character of the writing practices becomes visible in the case of life narratives which have been written on the back of calendar pages; more frequently, notebooks are used for handwritten works and loose sheets for typed manuscripts. The recent wide distribution of domestic printing and presentation technology which has accompanied the use of personal computers has inspired more elaborate styles of manuscript layout, involving colour print and binding. Frequently, these homemade booklets are produced by or with the help of the authors’ family members. The th latter phenomenon points to a fact that may be obvious in these late 20 and st early 21 century manuscripts, but holds equally true for earlier handwritten versions: Autobiographies are rarely the product of a single author, but are often co-authored and co-edited by other persons than the author-protagonist – including persons belonging to the intended audience of the text. However, the audience does not have to be close at all. As written texts, autobiographies are not spontaneously generated narratives like oral accounts at social occasions. They are deliberately and carefully composed by the authors before being presented to the audience for which they are intended. Unlike an oral narrator, the writer of an autobiographical text does not have to immediately grab the attention of his or

5

For a similar organisation of oral life narrative in Bulgaria see Koleva 1997.

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her audience. By telling a story in written form, the author can address an audience far away, unknown or even one not yet to be born. It is therefore all the more worthwhile to take into account Pierre Bourdieu’s advice to pay close attention to the market place where an author offers his or her life story to an audience.6 With popular autobiography, this act goes beyond setting a local story into its local context. I want to suggest that Austrian rural autobiographers link themselves to a textual universe that goes beyond their immediate social context when they write down their life stories, despite their potentially low degree of formal education and learning. This claim leads to a disciplinary intersection of linguistics, literary studies and social sciences that provides a set of valuable and interlinked concepts: intertextuality, discourse and interdiscourse, discursive strands and discursive intertwinement. In the following section, I will discuss how these concepts enhance the understanding of the popular autobiography text genre; after that, I will discuss my empirical application, and conclude with a discussion of the usefulness of the proposed strategy.

I NTERTEXTUALITY The social psychologist Jerome Bruner makes a point of how important readers are to autobiography: whatever the private intention of the author may have been, the readers make their own sense of it, and they are entitled to do so. This, he suggests, is because “the ‘publicness’ of autobiography constitutes something like an opportunity for an ever-renewable ‘conversation’ about conceivable lives” (Bruner 1997: 41). Bruner emphasizes the fact that the participation in this “conversation” usually involves both being a reader and being an author of an autobiographical statement. The rural autobiographers who produced the body of sources I used often declare themselves as readers. Maria Gruber, born into a Salzburg farming family in 1922, gives an extraordinarily detailed account about her reading preferences and her aspirations to become a writer when she was young: Only for my passion, reading, I never had time, except for the evenings in bed when I was dead tired. But I could not leave it be. There was not much, an almanac my father used to buy, or a trade magazine. In school it had always made me think that others could write so well and I couldn’t. I especially liked the stories of Peter Rosegger in the textbooks. Later, in the calendars, those of Platten Lisei. Even a woman from Hüttschlag [a neighbouring

6

See Bourdieu 1986.

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village, RG] could do it, and I still remember some of the stories she wrote for the calendars. Later Pacher, Grogger, Waggerl, Eberl, Brauman, Marie Ebner Eschenbach, and then Trenker. I admired them all. Most of all I enjoyed essay writing in school. I also used to help my younger siblings with it. But that was all for me. Now I think, maybe it was all illusion, and I would not have succeeded. We did not have much time for our ideas. On Sundays, we had to get our things in order, mend socks, fix clothes etc.7

Later in the text, Maria Gruber proves her admiration for the aforementioned Waggerl, when she uses a paraphrase from his novel Brot in order to describe the miracle of her mother’s pregnancy.8 Maria Gruber’s is an exceptionally clear case of intertextuality in popular autobiography. Direct references to literary authors or other authors of popular autobiography who have published in books can be found sporadically. However, the absence of direct references does not justify the assumption that authors did not read or reflect on other authors while writing. Even of those who were not dedicated readers like Maria Gruber we can assume that they were not isolated from the cultural repertoire of rural life stories. The most salient example in my context is Peter Rosegger. References to him occur – when they do – either by his name or by the name of Waldbauernbub, the protagonist of his collection of quasi-autobiographical childhood stories Als ich noch der Waldbauernbub war. Rosegger provided the paradigmatic example for nostalgic rural childhood memories in Austria. The son of an impoverished Styrian forest farmer, he received an education with the help of a benefactor and

7

“Nur für meine Leidenschaft, das Lesen, dafür hatte ich keine Zeit, außer am Abend wenn ich todmüde im Bett war. Aber das konnte ich einfach nicht lassen. Es gab nicht allzuviel, außer einem Bauernkalender, den Vater jedes Jahr kaufte oder eine Fachzeitung. In der Schule machte mir schon immer zu denken, warum andere so gut schreiben konnten und ich nicht. Besonders Peter Roseggers Geschichten in den Schulbüchern haben es mir angetan. Dann später in den Kalendern, von Platten Lisei. Sogar eine Hüttschlagerin konnte das, und ich weiß noch ein paar Geschichten in den Kalendern, die sie schrieb. Später Pacher, Grogger, Waggerl, Eberl, Braumann, Maria Ebner Eschenbach, und dann der Trenker. Alle habe ich bewundert. Am liebsten war mir in der Schule Aufsatzschreiben. Habe auch meinen jüngeren Geschwistern oft dabei geholfen. Bei dem blieb es dann auch bei mir. Jetzt denke ich oft, vielleicht war alles nur Einbildung und hätte doch nichts zustande gebracht. Zeit für unsere Ideen blieb nicht viel. Sonntags mussten wir unsere Sachen in Ordnung bringen, Strümpfe stopfen, Wäsche ausbessern usw.” Gruber: 31.

8

Gruber: 23.

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became a famous writer and journalist. His works featured in Austrian schoolbooks for over a century, which granted him a vast (however involuntary) readership.9 Furthermore, a TV series based upon the stories about the Waldbauernbub produced in the 1980s increased the range of his work’s reception and made it independent from reading.10 Even if direct references to Rosegger or the Waldbauernbub are few, the formal features of his childhood episodes are recurth rent.11 Given this reception history, it is reasonable to assume that for the 20 century rural autobiographers, these (actually semi-fictional) episodes belonged to the authors’ textual universe. In literary studies, there are divergent points of view on how broadly or narrowly intertextuality should be understood: either as a general principle, maintaining that each new text is a mosaic of texts that already exist, or more narrowly as an assumption that must be validated by empirically observed references. 12 The problem is quite similar in canonical literature, as it is in such marginal forms of literary production as popular autobiography: How do we deal with the unmentioned cultural repository of texts or narratives that play a role when new ones are being created? It would certainly be wrong to claim there was none just because no references are being made. This unmentioned shared knowledge is the link between an autobiographical author’s supposedly individual creation, and the collective framework of this individual act. I think that coming to grips with this uncharted territory, where Bruner’s “constant ‘conversation’ about conceivable lives” takes place, the intertextual reservoir of any autobiographical text is a key to the use of autobiographical sources in history. The psychologists Jens Brockmeier and Mark Freeman have attempted to tackle this problem. They developed the concept of narrative integrity, based on three well argued claims: First, any autobiographical narrative is inseparable from normative ideas of a “good life”, of a life lived well; second, the stronger the consensus about this normative idea is in a given social, cultural and historical setting, the more it will influence the way people narrate their life stories, in regards to the aesthetics of the form (including formal conventions), as well as the ethical commitment of the author/protagonist within the life narrative. It is this intersection of both an ethical and aesthetical criterion that constitutes the concept of narrative integrity. The third claim of Brockmeier and Freeman can be drawn from the former two, maintaining that autobiographical narrative, spo-

9

See Hömberger & Rossbacher 1977 and the discussion below.

10 See Wagner 1998. 11 See Schmidt-Dengler 1999. 12 Weinberg 2010: 193.

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ken or written, provides a useful vehicle for exploring not only the ethical dimensions of the author’s identity construction, but also the ethical fabric of the social worlds in which it emerges.13 The concept of narrative integrity points to a broad, culturally specific ethical discourse about biography. It also helps us approach this interface between individual autobiography and (collective) discourse by pointing out where to direct our attention: to the form of the narrative, and the evaluative passages.

A P OPULAR D ISCOURSE

ABOUT

R URAL P AST

By adopting Freeman’s and Brockmeier’s concept, I accept the assumption that popular autobiography forms part of a general discourse about ethics and biography that goes as far back as Augustin of Hippo’s Confessiones. However, using autobiography as a source for historical research on a certain topic narrows the pool of (auto)biographical texts down to those by authors (or about protagonists) with a shared frame of experience. These experiences may be exceptional circumstances such as the participation in war, or they may be broad but significant developments such as the social and economic changes in European rural societies during the past century. The writing of popular autobiography is often inspired by the sense of the author being a witness to these extraordinary events or major transitions. By providing this kind of testimony, they also participate in a popular discourse on history that involves other actors than just the lay writers themselves: academic historians, fictional writers, filmmakers and TV producers, and instructors in adult education. Rural popular autobiographies participate in such a thematically focused popular discourse on history. I locate the origins of this discourse in two branchth th es of Austrian literature dealing with the rural world in late 19 and early 20 century. The first tradition is the naturalist writing of authors such as Ludwig Anzengruber or Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, who had the intention to describe social conditions in the rural world; the second tradition is the more nostalgic and decidedly anti-modern Heimat- und Provinzliteratur, paradigmatically represented by authors such as Karl Heinrich Waggerl, idealizing the rural world as the better counterpart to the urban modern world. Both branches reflect upon the rural from the outside, but often with an autobiographical viewpoint.

13 Freeman & Brockmeier 2001: 75-77.

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Both traditions have been attributed to the above mentioned Peter th Rosegger.14 Both have featured in textbooks during the 20 century and have received broad reception. A survey in several rural communes in the Salzburg province from the 1970s showed that 60% of the respondents knew Rosegger and Waggerl from their own reading.15 There are three aspects of the literary tradition that are important for the popular discourse about rural past in which th the popular autobiographers of the later decades of the 20 century participated: the critical, as well as affirmative, reflection on rural existence; the autobiographical elements in fictional writing and occasional explicitly autobiographical writing; and the wide dissemination via textbooks. During the 1970s, a new literary genre emerged: Anti-Heimatliteratur. The new genre was provocative and radically critical of the nostalgic and romanticising tendencies of Heimat- und Provinzliteratur by addressing issues of violence and neglect in rural households and societies. The most salient example for AntiHeimatliteratur is the autobiographically inspired novel Schöne Tage by Franz Innerhofer.16 This type of literature was not favoured by rural readers, but they took notice of the public discussions it provoked. According to the Salzburg survey from 1977 for example, the author Innerhofer had been read by 12% of the respondents. This percentage was exceptional compared to other contemporary artistic writers, and most probably due to the fact that Innerhofer’s novel is set in a peasant household of rural Salzburg. However, Anti-Heimatliteratur spurred historians’ as well as film-makers’ interest in the rural past. Between 1976 and 1980, the controversial rural social drama Alpensaga was produced as th a TV series. The screenplay was set in the first half of the 20 century; it was also inspired by the advice of academic historians. At the time, Austrian historians had started to adopt bottom-up approaches to history and had become aware of popular autobiography. The foundation of the autobiographical archive Dokumentation Lebensgeschichtlicher Aufzeichnungen (DOKU) at the University of Vienna and the launch of a book series Damit es nicht verloren geht ..., which published examples from the collection, was part of this development in the early 1980s. TV adaptations of Rosegger’s novels and the aforementioned series based on the short childhood episodes Als ich noch der Waldbauernbub war were produced. The interest of the cultural sector, however, was not limited to Austria. By 1985, the German language book market took interest in rural life writing, when Anna Wimschneider’s autobiography Herbstmilch gained remark-

14 For a discussion of the literary tradition see Wagner 1985. 15 See Hömberger & Rossbacher 1977: 34-45. 16 See Schmidt-Dengler 2009: 75-77.

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able attention at the Frankfurt book fair. The best-selling book was also adapted for cinema.17 Within this context of media-supported storytelling, the authors of popular autobiographies contributed their narratives, and got the attention of a readership that would have otherwise ignored their books.

I NTERDISCOURSE While this context of public story-telling quite clearly indicates that popular rural autobiography is a discursive phenomenon, the appropriate conceptual framework is not as evident. In the history discipline, approaches to discourse have usually been inspired by Michel Foucault’s framing of discourse within relatively strong institutional structures of power. 18 In addition to Foucault’s influential example, this is because as historians we are, more or less, bound to our sources. Like the proverbial drunk who looks for his lost keys under the lamppost because that’s where the light is, historians gravitate towards administrative or other institutional sources because these have been conserved in sufficient numbers, and because we usually have knowledge of the processes and power relations in which they were created, so we can apply the conventional procedures of source critique to support our claims. It may be for this reason that autobiographical sources are not widely used and are continually contested within the field of history. This applies also to discourse studies: in his comprehensive overview on approaches to discourse analysis in history, Achim Landwehr points out that studies that treat topics other than canonical literature, delinquency and science are still desiderata, in particular approaches that look at social practices. 19 I did not intend to examine discourse from a social practice viewpoint either – I wanted to write a history dissertation on rural exodus. However, working on such a poorly administrated phenomenon, I could not afford to just dismiss a vast body of sources such as rural popular autobiography because it was not of administrative origin. Rather, I had to deal with the particular nature of this popular discourse about history that comes with the authors’ specific frames of experience. I had to find adequate concepts that would facilitate a description of how my sources function within this popular discourse, and what I could learn from this about their value as sources – Critical Discourse Analysis was helpful in providing some of these concepts.

17 Zeyringer 1999: 165. 18 See Landwehr 2008: 162. 19 Landwehr 2008: 162.

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This approach originates from linguistics, but has a clear intention to transcend disciplinary boundaries, in particular in the direction of social sciences or history. I will discuss below some approaches to discourse which I found useful. The concepts of the authors are similar, but differ in detail. For my own approach, I adopt the general definition of discourse by Titscher et al. The elaborate concepts of Fairclough, Link and Jäger are too specific to the research questions and empirical basis from which they derive to adopt them directly. Nevertheless, it helps to look at discourse from the respective author’s perspective in order to explain my own notion of popular discourse. I do not intend to reify these concepts, but rather suggest using them as tools to understand my sources’ genre and its communicative context. According to Critical Discourse Analysis, discourse is a form of social practice; a discursive act (like presenting a written autobiographical narrative to a reader) is conditioned by the social situation that frames it, but also constitutes new situations, objects of knowledge, and the social identities of, and relationships between, people and groups of people: “It is constitutive both in the sense that it helps sustain and reproduce the social status quo, and in the sense that it contributes to transforming it.” (Wodak 1996: 15) There are several approaches within linguistics to Critical Discourse Analysis that are rather independent but also similar; the most prominent are associated with Ruth Wodak and Norman Fairclough’s research teams at the Universities of Vienna and Lancaster, and Siegfried Jäger at the Duisburger Institut für Sprach- und Sozialforschung. The following definition of discourse is from an overview on discourse analysis with a focus on the Austrian and British exponents: (Discourse) can be understood as a complex bundle of simultaneous and sequential interrelated linguistic acts, which manifest themselves within and across the social fields of action as thematically interrelated semiotic, oral or written tokens, very often as ‘texts’ that belong to specific semiotic types, that is genres. The most salient feature of the definition of a ‘discourse’ is a macro-topic, like ‘unemployment’ (Titscher et al. 2000: 66).

Given these definitions, a lay writer of rural background’s choice of a genre such as autobiography must therefore be understood as social practice.20 Consequently, the question to ask is: what is a person doing who is writing and presenting an th autobiography, in particular about a life in rural 20 century Austria? Norman Fairclough categorises the use of genre by itself as a discursive action that can be analysed on different levels of abstraction. This distinction is not

20 Fairclough 2009: 26; from the viewpoint of speech act theory Bruner 1993: 42.

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only analytical, but also indicates a genre’s scope of impact. Situated genres are on a low level of abstraction; these are only used in a local context. Disembedded genres are on an intermediate level; these have an impact beyond the local through the media. The highest level of abstraction, in Fairclough’s terms, is the global genre. On this level, a genre is a concept of formal convention that can be recognised in any text or other linguistic utterance. Autobiography for example, would be such a global genre. According to these categories, a private-life narrative (oral or written) would be a situated genre, that is, a genre that has specific functions in its local situation. When such an autobiography gets published, it becomes disembedded, since it transcends the limits of the rural lay autobiographer’s purely local interaction with his or her local audience. I think it is exactly this occasional digression from the local context, in Fairclough’s wording, this disembedding of genre that gives rural popular autobiography in Austria its specific discursive qualities between private and public. The written form, the text genre, and the conventions of circulation enable the lay writers to become discursive actors beyond their local social environment. From a viewpoint of genre, they enter the discourse about life and how it is to be lived. From a viewpoint of the subject matter, they enter a popular discourse about the rural past and the massive social and economic transitions of rural societies during the past century. I choose to call this a popular discourse because it is distinct from the specialist discourse of academic history, as well as from simple private recollection. In fact, this popular discourse is the forum where private experiences or family recollections are compared, approved or challenged by public knowledge about the past that is also, as well as being the academic discipline, history – knowledge that becomes commonplace by means of the educational system and diverse strategies of popularisation practised by academic historians. In the case of the rural past, naturalist fictional approaches in literature and film also contribute to this discourse, as described above. This hybrid discourse can be captured by the term interdiscourse as defined by the literary scholar Jürgen Link and by the linguist Siegfried Jäger. Link distinguishes between specialist discourses and interdiscourse. Specialist discourses, such as academic history, have relatively clear formal rules on who can participate and what genres are appropriate. A precise terminology specialised for the respective subject is an important characteristic of such specialist discourses. Interdiscourse, on the other hand, is the realm where knowledge from specialist discourses is being processed by and for a broad, non-specialist public. The most important material dispositive of interdiscourse is the mass media. In contrast to the former, this discourse operates with a culturally and historically given set of stereotypical symbols linked to notions borrowed from the special-

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ized discourses. Interdiscourse is where specialised concepts become commonplace; it also provides a route for concepts to take when they are being adopted from a different specialised discourse.21 It is the realm of more or less accessible public knowledge. Siegfried Jäger introduces a new set of concepts to further define the relation between specialized discourses and interdiscourse: discursive strands, discursive levels and intertwinement.22 Discursive strands more or less correspond to the macro-topics mentioned in the definition of Titscher et al. above; they are discourses that are organized around a particular topic. In my context, the popular discourse about rural past and the ethical discourse about biography can be understood to be discursive strands within interdiscourse. Discursive levels (as defined by Jäger) are the particular social positions from which the speakers make their contributions within an interdiscourse. In my case, these levels correspond to being an author of a popular autobiography, but also an author of artistic literature, film or TV production, to being a scholar in the humanities and social sciences, or an instructor in adult education. In Jäger’s conceptual framework, interdiscourse is composed of a network of intertwined discursive strands. Jäger recommends paying close attention to the effect of the intertwinement of discursive strands. How can this advice be applied to rural popular autobiography? The twofold discursive context of lay life writing – that is, the ethical discourse on life and how it should be lived, and the particular popular discourse about historical events or processes witnessed – can be seen as two discursive strands within interdiscourse. This intersection of strands is where popular autobiography has its position in interdiscourse, and this intersection causes an effect on the genre. The two intertwining discourses are equally ethically loaded; while within the discourse about biography the authors of popular autobiography are required to integrate an aesthetical and an ethical criterion, they are also likely to make an ethical assessment of the difference between now and then due to the ever so present master narrative of progress. In the case of rural popular autobiography, this would mean comparing the modern world of today with the lost, traditional rural world of the past. The discursive level of popular autobiographers in the two discursive strands differs in respect to the power they have as discursive actors. Within the discursive strand about biography, these humble lay writers are marginal; they are not famous enough to spur public interest, nor are their life courses exceptional or

21 See Link 1986: 5. 22 See Jäger 2009: 158-165.

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their writing style skilful enough to justify public interest. If a popular history discourse, such as the one about the rural past, intersects, it enhances the status of the lay autobiographers because at that point there is indeed a public interest in their humble lives which makes them exceptional. Being witness to an historical process or event that is at the centre of a different discursive strand transforms the otherwise private and intimate practice of autobiographical selfreflection into participation in a (public) discourse. Moreover, it justifies the narrative being circulated in the media. This intertwinement of discursive strands (in Jäger’s terms) marks the point where the disembedding of an otherwise local discourse (according to Fairclough) can be observed. The disembedding vehicle is media; it is a precondition for authors to become discursive actors beyond local scope. During the 1980s and 1990s, popular autobiography’s enhanced media access gained momentum. The publication of these narratives as books became conventional; in general, this had an impact on lay life writing. These books motivated others to write down their autobiographies; the media and books, in particular, became part of the horizon of popular autobiographers, no matter whether they made efforts to publish or confined their audience to family and friends.

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When I started my project on rural exodus, the richest sources at my disposal were popular autobiographies at Dokumentation lebensgeschichtlicher Aufzeichnungen (DOKU) at the University of Vienna. I knew about the archive’s policy of publishing popular autobiography and encouraging life writing in adult education; I needed some measure in order to estimate the impact of this policy on the available autobiographies.23 Therefore, the first step of my research was to conduct an exploratory analysis of descriptive meta-data on approximately 340 rural autobiographers represented in DOKU at the time (2004). These data described sociographic information on the authors/protagonists, text features and information on the handling of the texts, that is, on the channels by which the manuscripts reached DOKU, and on publication. As a result, I did not only find an answer to my specific question. The empirical analysis also revealed a particular arrangement of public and private author-audience relations in popular autobiography, together with the outlines of an interdiscursive framework including sev-

23 On these policies and the results of the data analysis in general, see Garstenauer 2010.

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eral actors and levels (in Jäger’s terms), as well as the material and institutional dispositives such as publishing houses, journals or adult education programmes. The method I applied is multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), an explorative method included within geometric data analysis that systematically compares cases based on a multitude of variables simultaneously, and provides graphic representations of the similarities and dissimilarities among those cases.24 MCA is also a variant of factor analysis. The factors deriving from the procedure can be characterised as continua between two extremes; I will describe the factors obtained in this manner. By identifying the first four factors, I could discern the most salient aspects structuring my sample of rural autobiographers. The first factor refers to the relationship between author and audience, ranging from close audiences within the family or the immediate social environment, to remote, special audiences belonging to an entirely different social environment, such as in adult education or academic historians, or, as a third option, the generally public but anonymous audience of the mass media. This factor also includes a time component; whereas older texts were rather commemorative texts dedicated to a familiar audience, all of the texts that were written for the DOKU or within adult education programmes are more recent. This information is redundant per se, after all, DOKU and its life-writing promotion programmes did not exist before the 1980s. However, this structure of period of origin and preferred audience goes along with particular text features. The older texts written for the families are family chronicles or longer autobiographies, and were written by venerable and, in most cases, male heads of households. It is noteworthy to say that this sub-genre still exists, and several more recent texts match the description. However, it is a formal tradition that reaches back well into the early th 20 century. In contrast, the more recent texts stemming from DOKU’s outreach to autobiographers, or similar such cases, are usually brief, topic related, often confined to childhood and youth, and have been written mainly by unmarried or widowed women. The second factor refers to the ambition of the autobiographers as writers. The continuum ranges from poetic and sometimes nostalgic recollections of farm life written by peasant men and women or their sons and daughters, to book length narratives about overcoming the hard living conditions of the rural poor. This second factor shows a clear correspondence between social origin of the author, form and context.

24 For a concise introduction into the family of correspondence analysis and related techniques, see Backhaus et al. 2008: 535-550.

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Factor three refers to education, differentiating between well-educated writers of long, coherent autobiographies, and authors of poor origin who did not receive an education beyond elementary school and wrote brief texts. The educated autobiographers were in some cases not even rural residents by origin, but were forced to do agricultural labour due to economic hardship and food shortages for some time during or after the wars, or who voluntarily chose a rural life. The texts of these authors were frequently published, and often motivated by books written by Barbara Passrugger, one of the most popular peasant authors within the DOKU book series.25 The third factor also has a gender aspect, with a bias towards male authors at the extreme of educated autobiographers, and female authors at the extreme of the poorly educated. Factor four finally refers to the motivating strategies used by DOKU and related institutions in adult education, marked by two different initiatives during the “International Year of Older Persons” in 1999. One of these writing campaigns was a writing competition, addressing older people “with a talent for writing”; the other one was an open call designed to get as many and diverse texts as possible, promoting that every life story was equally interesting and welcome. Integration: Relationship between Author and Audience (Factor I), and Socially Determined Aspirations as Writers (Factor II).

The factors have decreasing importance – factor one integrates most of the information of the data, factor two the second most and so forth. The information

25 Passrugger published three volumes within the series: Passrugger 1989, 1993 and 1998.

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provided by the first two factors is therefore more appropriate for general observations; the subsequent factors, three and four, still bear meaning, but are concerned with details. Therefore, the graphic integration of the first two factors is the best schematic approximation of the structures of similarity and dissimilarity among the rural autobiographers within my sample. The information that was collected about the pathways the autobiographical manuscripts took on their way to ending up at DOKU revealed the most about the discursive nature of rural popular autobiography. Some texts were handed in by the authors’ children or other relatives, e.g. in reaction to one particular DOKU’s media campaign explicitly asking for older texts kept within families. This pathway refers to commemorative writing for the family; it indicates autobiographical writing that is foremost private. These texts are family histories assembled around the autobiography of the author, including biographies of ancestors and the children’s careers. The evaluation of the rural transition in such texts makes sense only from the perspective of a collective involving more than one generation. Other texts were handed over to the archive by publishing houses which had received autobiographies designed as book manuscripts that had been submitted on the author’s own initiative. This pathway refers to a tradition of publishing th life stories of humble workers or peasants that reaches far back into 19 century, which was continued by the DOKU book series Damit es nicht verloren geht ... Similarly, an Austrian weekly maintained a column with readers’ life stories for some time and handed over the texts that were sent in to DOKU after the column was stopped. This pathway indicates a writing practice that is by principle orientated to the public. Here, the evaluation of the rural transition makes sense in the individual experiences of the protagonist of the story. Two further pathways are closely linked to DOKU’s life writing campaigns: via adult education writing workshops or via direct media promotional campaigns conducted by the archive. These initiatives created a semi-public relationship between author and audience which neither bears the social constraints of what can and cannot be said within the family context, nor the formal constraints that go along with publication. This semi-public realm opens up a slot for life narratives that lack narrative integrity according to Brockmeier and Freeman, either because they are not well told (the aesthetic criterion of narrative integrity), or they fail to satisfy the ethical criterion because the authors fail to make sense of their particularly hard life courses. In some cases, the lack of narrative closure and the failure to come to an evaluation coincide. These cases are extremely rare, but important, since there is an intrinsic bias in popular autobiog-

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raphy towards lives that can easily be put into story form and are likely to please an audience.

C ONCLUSION The principal argument of this article is that popular autobiography has a twofold discursive context. Via the concept of intertextuality, I introduced the concept of a culturally specific, ethical discourse about life course as suggested by Bruner, Brockmeier and Freeman. These scholars, all of them psychologists by discipline, do not use the term discourse; however, I find the concept of interdiscourse as introduced by Link extremely useful in order to get a more precise idea of what Bruner calls the “ever renewable ‘conversation’ about conceivable lives”. Basically, the ethical-biographical discourse is a lay discourse that takes its topics and terms from all specialist discourses that have to do with the notion of a life lived well, be it theological or philosophical ethics, education or social security institutions; it is a discourse that uses commonplace instead of precise terminology in order to permit mediation between the special discourses and the lay participants’ firsthand experience of how it is to have a particular life course. Autobiographers who share a particular life experience (be it a historical event or process) usually have something to say about this experience in their life narratives. In fact, bearing witness to an event or process that is considered to be of historical importance in the present is often a justification for the lay autobiographers’ claiming of the authorial voice. Autobiographies that share such an experience can be conceived as participating in a popular discourse on this particular history. In my example, this common reference is the transition of rural life world into modernity. Taking Jäger’s advice to pay attention to the discursive effects of intertwinements of discursive strands, I suggest that popular autobiography is situated at just such an intertwinement of the ethical interdiscourse on the life course and on a particular thematic popular discourse on history. How does discourse help to contextualise popular autobiography as a source? It does not solve the problem of judging an autobiographical account’s accuracy vis-à-vis historical events. In this regard, we are confined to cautious confidence in the author’s intention to tell the truth – at least as long as there is no reason to doubt. My suggestion is to leave the question of reliability of autobiographical sources undecided, and instead focus on the various ways in which certain experiences are being related, and which possible experiences are scarcely being related, or not at all. One of the merits of discourse analysis is to be able to give an

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idea of what can and cannot be said at a certain time and place, and why this is so. I will not suggest that historians should apply discourse analysis every time they are using autobiographical sources; after all, not all research questions that are relevant in our discipline are applicable to this approach. But assuming there is this double discursive context of popular autobiography, what can be done is to pay attention to the interrelation of form, ethical commitment and the authoraudience relationship, in order to get a grasp of the discursive context of the source and the conventions that regulate what can or cannot be said. In my research I found various forms of acceptable life narratives about the transition to modernity in the rural world – the peasant family romance that narrates the transition smoothly along the succession of the generations, or the heroic life story of a single individual who experienced the transition dramatically within a few years of his or her life. I also found variations that were formulated at the boundaries of what can be said, fragmented life accounts about extreme hardship or the monotony of continuous poverty that do not easily transform into stories, partly because they do not provide any sense of closure to the reader. Furthermore, as a consequence, it is important to get as diverse a sample of autobiographies as possible – even if the sample is not large. Making sense of the past is a collective endeavour. I think it is important to have knowledge of which experiences can be included in this endeavour, and which cannot. Hanna Arendt defined objectivity in a way that I find very pertinent for working with autobiographical material: Objectivity can only be attained in the public realm, when the matter in question becomes the object of a multitude of perspectives. An experience that is kept private will be confined to the subjectivity of whoever experienced it.26 It will not become part of what is considered to have happened in the past: it will be ignored by contemporaries and historians alike. With regard to the biographical and popular history discourses, we will perhaps not know what has not been said, but we can at least hypothesize about the omissions.

R EFERENCES Arendt, Hannah (2005): Vita Activa oder Vom tätigen Leben. München: Piper. Backhaus, Klaus et al. (2008): Multivariate Analysemethoden. Eine anwendungsorientierte Einführung. Berlin: Springer. Becker, H. S. (1986): Biographie et mosaique scientifique. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 62/63: 105-110.

26 Arendt 2005: 72-73

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Blaumeiser, Heinz & Elisabeth Wappelshammer (1997): Zwischen Ich-Geschichte und Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Lebensgeschichtliche Reflexionen in der Erwachsenenbildung. In: Eder, Franz X., Peter Feldbauer & Erich Landsteiner (Hg.): Wiener Wege der Sozialgeschichte. Themen – Perspektiven – Vermittlungen. Wien: Böhlau; pp. 441-460. Bourdieu, Pierre (1986): L’illusion biographique. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 62/63: 69-72. Bruner, Jerome (1993): The Autobiographical Process. In: Folkenflik, Robert (Ed.): The Culture of Autobiography. Construction of Self-Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press; pp. 38-56. Fairclough, Norman (2009): Analysing Discourse. Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Freeman, Mark & Jens Brockmeier (2001): Narrative and Integrity: Autobiographical Identity and the Meaning of the ‘Good Life’. In: Brockmeier, Jens & Donal Carbaugh (Eds.): Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture. Amsterdam: Benjamins; pp. 75-102. Garstenauer, Rita (2010): Account Books, Amateur Literature and True Stories. The Practice of Rural Life Writing in 20th Century Austria. In: Language and the Scientific Imagination: Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI), 28 July – 2 August 2008 Language Centre, University of Helsinki, Finland. http://Hdl.Handle.Net/10138/15338. Gruber, Maria (ca. 1988): Lebenserinnerungen. Typescript, 70 p. Dokumentation lebensgeschichtlicher Aufzeichnungen, Department of Economic and Social History, Vienna University. Hömberger, Walter & Karlheinz Rossbacher (1977): Lesen auf dem Lande. Literarische Rezeption und Mediennutzung im ländlichen Siedlungsgebiet Salzburgs. Bericht über ein empirisches Forschungsprojekt. Salzburg: Institut für Germanistik. Innerhofer, Franz (1974): Schöne Tage. Salzburg: Residenz. Jäger, Siegfried (2009): Kritische Diskursanalyse. Eine Einführung. Münster: Unrast. Kohli, Martin (1981): Wie es zur “biographischen Methode” kam und was daraus geworden ist. Ein Kapitel aus der Geschichte der Sozialforschung. Zeitschrift für Soziologie 10: 273-293. Koleva, Daniela (1997): The “Chronotopos” in Life Histories. In: Makarovic, Marija (Ed.): Vrednotelnje Zivljenjskih Pricevanj. Pisa: Università Degli Studi Di Pisa, Dipartimento Di Linguistica; pp. 77-83. Landwehr, Achim (2008): Historische Diskursanalyse. Frankfurt/M.: Campus.

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Link, Jürgen (1986): Noch einmal: Diskurs. Interdiskurs. Macht. KultuRRevolution 11: 4-7. Müller, Günther (2006): Dokumentation lebensgeschichtlicher Aufzeichnungen. In: Eigner, Peter; Christa Hämmerle & Günter Müller (Hg.): Briefe – Tagebücher – Autobiographien. Studien und Quellen für den Unterricht. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag; pp. 140-146. Passrugger, Barbara & Ilse Maderbacher (1989): Hartes Brot. Aus dem Leben einer Bergbäuerin. Wien: Böhlau. Passrugger, Barbara & Georg Hellmich (1993): Steiler Hang. Wien: Böhlau. Passrugger, Barbara & Therese Weber (1998): Mein neues Leben. Wien: Böhlau. Rosegger, Peter (1900): Als ich noch der Waldbauernbub war. Jugendgeschichten aus der Waldheimat. München: Staackmann. Schmidt-Dengler, Wendelin (2009): “[...] das fortgeschrittenste Land, ohne es zu wissen.” Unbewusster Avantgardismus in Österreich. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag. – (1999): Als ich noch. Peter Roseggers einfache Kunst des Erzählens. In: Schmidt-Dengler, Wendelin & Karl Wagner (Hg.): Peter Rosegger im Kontext. Wien: Böhlau; pp. 1-13. Titscher, Stefan et al. (2000): Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis. London: Sage. Wagner, Karl (1985): Heimat und Provinzliteratur in den dreißiger Jahren. Am Beispiel der Rezeption Peter Roseggers. In: Amann, Klaus & Albert Berger (Hg.): Österreichische Literatur der dreißiger Jahre. Ideologische Verhältnisse, institutionelle Voraussetzungen, Fallstudien. Wien: Böhlau; pp. 215246. Wagner, Karl (1998): Heimat als Film. Rosegger-Verfilmungen von Robert Wienes ‘I.N.R.I.’ bis zur Gegenwart. Palimpszeszt 9 szám. http://magyarirodalom.elte.hu/palimpszeszt/09_szam/13.htm. Warneken, Bernd J. (1988): Zur Schichtspezifik autobiographischer Darstellungsmuster. In: Gestrich, Andreas (Hg.): Biographie – sozialgeschichtlich. Sieben Beiträge. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht; pp. 141-162. – (1985): Populare Autobiographik. Zu einer Quellengattung der Alltagsforschung. Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde. Weinberg, Manfred (2010): Literatur. In: Gudehus, Christian; Ariane Eichenberg & Harald Welzer (Hg.): Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Stuttgart: Metzler; pp. 184-195. Wodak, Ruth (1996): Disorders of Discourse. London: Longman.

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Zeyringer, Klaus (1999): Österreichische Literatur 1945-1998. Überblicke, Einschnitte, Wegmarken. Innsbruck: Haymon. Alpensaga (TV series). Österreich 1976/1980. Book: Wilhelm Pevny, Peter Turrini. Director: Dieter Berner. Waldheimat (TV series). Österreich/BRD 1983/1984, Book: Lida Winiewicz based on Peter Rosegger. Directors: Hermann Leitner, Wolf Dietrich.

Curating People? Museum Mediated Memories and the Politics of Representation E LIZABETH C ARNEGIE

I NTRODUCTION This article considers a small number of museums within the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe, notably Hungary, Poland and Romania, which have been developed to focus on either radical aspects of people’s pasts or have arisen as a direct consequence of political change. Through an examination of these museums, this paper explores the potential for museums to act as spaces in which the “difficult” (Bonell & Simon 2007) aspects of the lives of ordinary men and women and the legacies and biases of such representations are interpreted. Through consideration of collecting and display processes, this article questions whether it is possible to create “warts and all” views of personal community experiences and the impact of political changes which reflect often painful, shameful or traumatic memories, whilst remaining sensitive to participants’ needs and fears of exposure. To begin with, the development of museums, notably “social history” museums, and their role and responsibilities in creating representations of particular, and often disenfranchised, even victimised, groups within society will be discussed. Whilst other museums also consider, for example, social poverty and child abuse, the museums under consideration here all focus on local and distinct communities and “peoples”. This does not imply that their purpose is the same in every case, nor does it equate the acts and atrocities of war with the less overtly politicised acts of everyday life within the socially constructed groups of the

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working class. However, many of the museums discussed in the context of this chapter include some reference to their intended communities in their title; for example, the People’s Palace, Glasgow (where I was a curator from 1991-8) and the Romanian Peasant Museum. Many museums draw on oral testimony for “people” displays. However, the focus of the “remembering” in the museums under consideration here, with their emphasis on representing difficult aspects of social, cultural and political life, may impact on those who share their stories. This paper explores the role of the museum in presenting the “people’s” stories. It reflects on this museological practice of “curating” people and interrogates how such interpretations impact on local, individual or communities’ sense of ownership of the past. In conclusion, the paper will question whether such histories, and indeed museum spaces, achieve their purpose.

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Most of the “people’s” museums under consideration here can be termed social history museums (Bennett 1995). Social history museums emphasised a shift in the nature of collections and subjects covered within industrial and latterly, postindustrial cities. Such representations are of course dependant on creating a sense of community cohesiveness, which in this case is the creation of a culturally distinct body that we tend to label “the working class” (Edensor 2002), what Marcus terms “pure inventions of a particular world historical system of political economy” (1984: 178). In short, social history museum representations are not just aimed at educating the working classes, but are in fact about the working classes and as such, draw on the memories and life histories of people who accept this definition of their cultural distinctiveness. Kavanagh (1996), O’Neill (1996) and Fleming (1996) argue strongly that museums, and particularly social history museums, should be places for social discourse. Accordingly, the key reflections in this chapter are aimed at achieving a clearer understanding of the curatorial agendas as there are clearly power structures and organisational expectations which influence and shape museum representations. Indeed, Pieterse (1997: 138) argues that museums tend to keep their awareness of the power of such representations out of view (in the sense of how such organisations function as a consequence of curatorial decision-making).Yet museum knowledge, particularly when the museum is local or central government funded and managed, reflects society’s contemporary values and political stand-

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points and this inevitably impacts on how museums exhibit ‘their people’. And as Silberman states, “our material legacy is also found in the sometimes unpleasant sampling of the achievements – and failings – of our own civilization” (2004: 11). For those museums within the emerging Europe under consideration here, where the “people” are being interpreted in the context of political as well as cultural change, there are clear political agendas which impact on the nature of the stories selected and those who are doing the telling. A key question therefore becomes: Are “the represented” having visions and versions of their past “thrust upon” them by the organisations creating the displays? Additionally, as consumers of such exhibitions are often drawn from diverse and unrelated communities and cultures, is it appropriate that such problematic histories are available to all?

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People’s museums, through community consultation and actively collecting oral testimonies, are in effect “curating” people. Moreover, through the objects they select and the layers of interpretation they construct, they are curating a “people” through the lens of collective memory. Green argues that contemporary oral history is “converging with collective memory studies, within which individual memory is in danger of being subsumed under ‘collective memory’” (2004: 37) and questions whether “individual memories challenge dominant narratives, such as those of the nation state for example?” (2004: 41). This chapter therefore explores the vexed question of who are the ‘people’ and what is their role in the interpretation of the recent past. Clearly the people constructed and referred to differ in each case. Within the UK context, the “people” tend to be localised, linked to the geographical remit of the museum. However, within the emerging Europe political change has resulted in the repositioning and development of museums which address aspects of the political pasts, drawing on individuals’ memories to create a collective narrative which serves the present context for remembering. As Kurkowska-Budzan notes, shaping collective memory is possible under some conditions, the main one being: “that the interpretations of the past produced by authorities or the spokespersons […] not contradict the lived experience of individuals”(2006: 134). “Remembering”, and indeed in many cases the democratic right to publically remember, has become a key weapon in times of cultural change which might create new “truths” and ways of living. Thus, these “new museums” reflect a more overtly politicized reclaiming of the recent past through the medium of the museum than is apparent

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in the precurser “social history” approach. These museums, which often inhabit symbolic spaces, can be viewed as a natural successor to the genre and need to be considered here because they represent a particular form of reclaiming of peoples’ pasts through the museum as ‘commemoration’ sites or ‘grassroots memorials’ (Sánchez-Carretero & Margy 2010).

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Thomson (1998) states that an individual’s memories are structured and restructured to support their current identities, and are influenced by the contexts of their remembering. He further maintains that this suggests that museums become a catalyst for such remembering and indeed influence the creation of “their museum mediated selves”. I argue that memories – of ordinary people – may be appropriated or actively sought out, in order to serve the wider aims of local, state-funded museums, and that community consultation, used to inform displays, is subject to self-censorship, community collusion in “stigma management” and the curatorial decision making process of local and national government officers. Oral history is both a process and a product in this sense and as such is subject to much debate and criticism regarding its value as “real” history. This poses a potential question regarding how to represent the unpleasant, problematic and potentially contradictory versions of events which become official documents and are subject to political and institutional biases (Troulliot 1996; Hammersley 2000). Rickard maintains that when interviewing around trauma and taboo subjects the interviewer becomes “implicated in the instability of such narrative constructions” evident in recollections of the disenfranchised and invariably, she argues, the “less powerful” in society are subject to historical and dominant narratives. This process she likens to getting “into the closet” with interviewees as “together interviewer and interviewee bring into the open secrets which in a certain way are already known but ignored” (2004: 41). Rose notes that “the irony of course is that not to reveal it, is to ensure the reproduction of violence and distortions” (Rose 2004: 175) and so these individual memories of personal trauma or of war or impacts of political regimes are stories that need to be told for societies to move forward collectively. It might also be argued that it is still the less powerful in society whose memories are used to serve the political present. Museums then, use oral history as an interpretive tool and as a way of giving a voice to individuals ensuring their influence in community engagement. The

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individual interview may be used to develop a collective narrative and this is clearly the way that most museums use oral history, although the wider aims of the museum may well be to create a forum for “counter narratives” which challenge existing or outmoded “truths”. Thus museums under consideration here may actively seek memories which “social, institutional and cultural forces have often colluded to silence”, stories which “threaten the family harmony and community order” and in the case of the emerging museums in Europe, stories that highlight old regimes. The location of such debates in museums may help to take away the social stigma and shame which, for example, many victims of domestic violence might feel (Carnegie 1996, Carnegie 1998). “Undesired differentness” needs to be confronted on both sides as individuals know and fear they will be exposed if their stigma based on background, profession, political allegiances, poverty or abuse is exposed. One of the main tensions inherent in the curatorial role is just how risktaking they are able to be, if curatorial risk-taking can in fact expose the very communities they are intending to empower within a public arena. Yet, the reason for using oral histories is to highlight individuals’ accounts in order to give emotional depth to the displays. Such individuals become ‘conduits for a public view of intimate history’ (Zeldin 1996; DuBois 2000). They become both exhibits and visitors and, as such, they are subject to the impacts of their own histories as their accounts pass from the original contexts of interviews to those of the museum. Although Herman determines that “people experience conflict between the will to deny horrible events and to proclaim them out loud” (Herman1992: 1) and individual responses to past events can be viewed by exhibition organisers as a necessary part to the “reclaiming” of collective apolitical pasts. Museums then increasingly function as “cultural stations”, helping audiences to make sense of uncertainty as a consequence of cultural change. In this way, they can create a forum for community pride and debate and become the locus of communal and community memory. Museums become custodians of authorised versions of the past (Hetherington, 2000; Barr, 2005) with interviews framed to encourage engagement with the museum and ultimately the organisation and political values of local and national government funders. I argue in this chapter that museums, by collecting memories, are curating people; and a key way they do this is through accessioning interviews within museum archives with the museum holding the right to use the material in a variety of ways – commonly as an assessable archive document, within displays as quotes in text or within sound stations audio or video form, and in subsequent publications (Clark & Carnegie 2003).

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Thus interviews are collected as objects and the terms they have agreed to at the interview stage become the terms that will determine the use and public access to their memories in perpetuity. Although in practise, museums are likely to respond to the wishes of any individual or family member who make seek to remove content that they later regret, crucially in practice, they have no legal requirement to do so. Despite the organisational aims and funding, it is ultimately individual curators and management staff who will be the decision takers, and as will be discussed below, they inevitably encounter the need to censure and even self-censure of occasion – or indeed the need to stand firm for the common good of the “People”. This can become problematic if individuals, or commonly their families, thereafter feel exposed by both the act of remembering and the giving away of their ‘story’ to the museum. Most of the cases under consideration here are domestic and intimate life histories, however, in the case of, for example, the Terror Haza Museum (2002), future cultural change in Hungary might well lead to a repositioning and exposure of those whose memories were used to highlight the treatment of Hungarians during both communism and fascism. Interviews are then used within object-centred displays to bring a “hyper-reality” to the “truthmaking” as I will now go on to discuss.

C URATING P EOPLE The starting point for my discussion is the “people’s museums” in the United Kingdom: the People’s Palace Glasgow; The People’s Story, Edinburgh; and the People’s Museum, Manchester. With “People” in their title, they inevitably suggest that they are about, and for “the People”. As Green (2004) notes above, museums draw on individual memories to curate a form of constructed collectivism. In this way the “People” are united in the imagination of the curatorial and managerial staff, and given wider meaning within society. The notion of belonging to a “People” is extended to visitors who as the “People” are invited to see themselves, or at least their historical counterparts, reflected within the displays. It is important to bear in mind that participants in museum projects such as these described here are named persons, and not codified anonymously as is the practice in social science research. Fraser believes that there is much to gain from this form of representation, both for museums as learning organisations and for society in general. He notes that, “the more we see the stories of real, normal people engaging in civic discourse in our museums, the more resilient and informed we will become as a society” (2007:337).

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Yet, as O’Neill notes, “storytelling acknowledges that each of us is engaged in a constant process of telling and retelling our own story as we try to assimilate new experiences to previous versions of who we are and how the world works” (2007:387). The curated “People” who give their memories are rarely revisited in order to determine how the passing of time, and of course the changing context for the memories, has influenced them. Indeed it also seems likely that the museum halts the process, trapping the individuals’ memories in the moment of giving, with those interviewed forced to both relive these memories but also to continue to stand by them. It might be worth questioning if this is destructive to the individuals’ sense of development for the common good of memories for the “People”.

R ADICALISING THE “P EOPLE ’ S P AST ” A common thread in these museums is the radicalisation of the Peoples’ past – either within the domestic sphere through the emphasis on social poverty and class exploitation and/or the processes and demands of labour markets. The People’s History Museum, Manchester makes these links explicit through focusing on social and political movements, such as co-operatives and friendly societies and trade unions. Museums such as the Terror Haza and the Warsaw Rising Museum (2004) commemorate those victims of political regimes, and a key way they do this is to use the words and faces of real people as a form of ‘every people’. These museums, though they have very different aims, all serve to highlight – and often reclaim – aspects of ‘people’s pasts’ which would otherwise be problematic to display. They are all intended to unite those people in the present, whether the subject matter is domestic violence, insurgence, war or genocide. The intimate voice of “People” reflected in the displays is designed and curated to appeal to a broader humanity, albeit in some cases visitors are being united against a common foe, be that capitalism, cultures, countries or political regimes. I will now consider some key examples of the “People’s” genre. The People’s Palace, Glasgow’s social history museum in the east end of the city, has been a multi-purpose museum, winter garden and all round community centre for the “people” of the city of Glasgow, Scotland for nearly 120 years (Carnegie et al. 2005). The web site currently states that the museum provides “a wonderful insight into how Glaswegians lived, worked and played in years gone

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by”.1 This slightly anodyne introduction belies the fact that Glasgow remains one of the poorest cities in Britain and that displays inevitably reflect this. O’Neill highlights that even within the contemporary city some “30 per cent of Glasgow’s population experiences the greatest poverty and the lowest level of educational attainment in Britain, and by some measures (such as heart disease) the worst health anywhere in the developed world” (O’Neill 2007: 381). The historical context sets the scene for displays which force the viewer to accept that social issues prevalent in historical, industrialized Glasgow remain a part of Glasgow’s present and likely future and therefore cannot be viewed as past ails. The visitor expecting to learn about history may therefore be forced to face the realities of life in the present, which may impact on their own lives in ways they may not expect or even seek to witness within a museum, with its connotations of “pastness”. Interestingly, O’Neill, who was responsible for the redisplay of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum which was finally completed in 2009, determines that the political will and spirit of the city influences the approach to displays within the wider museum service. He notes that, “dominated by Labour administrations since the 1930s, the Glasgow City Council could be seen as community-minded and socially conservative as much as ideologically socialist” (O’Neill 2007: 380). The People’s Palace, as Glasgow social history museum, was able to take a more radical stance in displays and, as I have discussed elsewhere (Carnegie 2006), curatorial staff, driven by a desire for “honest” displays, were inevitably more radical in their vision than both the local participants/visitors and the funding and political bodies that the museum represents. This radicalism inevitably cause frictions within the service, and as noted earlier, with community ambassadors and local visitors who were potentially exposed by this positioning. O’Neill notes that staff responsible for the later redisplays at Kelvingrove “abandoned a tendency towards radical change for its own sake, and replaced it with a commitment to what worked for visitors (actual and potential) – based on consultation and experiment” (O’Neill 2007: 388). He later comments that, “we have to be as rigorous in knowing our audience as we do in knowing about the objects. Above all, these forms of knowledge have to be in constant dialogue” (O’Neill 2007: 389). This further reflexivity on the curatorial role and purpose acknowledges that to force radicalism within displays is not inclusive, and is in fact little different from the traditional approach of object-led curators who controlled the messages.

1

http://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/museums/our-museums/peoples-palace/about-thePeople%27s%20Palace/Pages/home.aspx; accessed 7th March, 2011.

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Museums therefore reflect the cultural change within the organisation and the political positioning of staff and funders, with no guarantee that there can be a mutual meeting ground in the “public square”. Nonetheless, O’Neill argues that the public seek “real meaning” – as opposed to technical descriptions. He argues that they mean “the objects’ human interest and cultural context—their primary meaning to their most significant user/maker” (2007: 389). Social history museums or the museums in emerging Europe set up to memorialise those victims of past regimes, seek to achieve this ‘real meaning’ through the curation of “real people”. Another Scottish “peoples” museum, The People’s Story in Edinburgh, takes a historical approach, noting that it “explores the lives of Edinburgh’s ordinary people at work and play from the late 18th century to today”, although we are told that “Real people’s own memories are used throughout the Museum”.2 Opening in 1990, the People’s Story is a much more recent addition to Edinburgh Museums and was influenced by the existing ‘Peoples’ Museums of Glasgow and Manchester and the emerging social history discipline. It sought to offer a different perspective on the city of Edinburgh, which had been largely interpreted within a traditional history context and format.3 The new museum represented a cultural shift away from the history of the ruling classes and the potential embarrassment such approaches represent within a modern, democratic and mostly Labour run council. The Earl Hague bequest, for example, of material pertaining to the life of Earl Hague had been accepted on behalf of the council on condition that a part of the collection always be shown within the Museum of Edinburgh. Over time, as attitudes to war changed and indeed the nature of patriotism and aristocratic rights, this material became exceedingly problematic to display. The People’s Story offers the opportunity for a counter-balanced view of people’s lives where warfare heralded not just heroism but loss. In fact, the new museum grew from an election manifesto pledge that the city of Edinburgh should have a museum of the people, and as such, The People’s Story is unique in that it became a mandatory provision of the elected council.

2

http://www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk/Venues/The-People-s-Story.aspx accessed 7th March, 2011.

3

http://www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk/Venues/The-People-s-Story.aspx.

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S OCIAL I MPACTS AND THE E MERGENCE OF W ORKING C LASS L IFE

OF A

C RITIQUE

The emphasis on play in web introductions to both the People’s Story Edinburgh and the People’s Palace Glasgow could be read as an attempt to reassure potential visitors that the displays are not unremittingly bleak, despite the key themes of poverty, the loss of the industrial base, and war. In both cases, “play” in the leisure context involves alcohol consumption. The People’s Story uses set pieces of both a public house and a tea room which serves to set up both class and gender distinctions, albeit in a “traditional” and stereotyped manner. The People’s Palace, through investigating the Glaswegian’s relationship with alcohol and the potential destructive consequences on self and family, takes a more radical view of the “demon drink”. Indeed, alcohol provides a key example of an area of conflict, and would-be stigma management, when the “People” who were consulted regarding potential themes to be developed for the centenary redisplay, requested that alcohol consumption – a source of shame and hardship in contemporary Scotland – not be included. Discussions amongst curatorial staff determined that alcohol consumption, and indeed alcohol abuse was, and remains, a key social problem within the city of Glasgow and if this was not covered in displays it would highlight a failure of the museum to address contemporary social concerns. The resulting thematic displays honestly depict Glasgow “people’s” relationship with alcohol and whilst this might be curatorially appropriate for an institution which is publically funded and has an expected social role, it was a decision that proved unpopular with focus groups and subsequent visitors from the locality. Interestingly, focus groups noted a desire to see displays relating to World War Two. This of course reflects the demographic of the focus groups and also the continued central importance of WWII within the current education curriculum. This period in recent history, and still within living memory for many, represents a time when local people felt unified and experienced a heightened sense of being alive. However, it is important to note that Glasgow did not experience the war, as did Clydebank for example, and World War II was not therefore an obvious topic for inclusion. Curators mindful of the unpopular decision to highlight alcohol consumption elected to compromise in this area and a section was created on World War II centred around an air raid shelter that had been recently salvaged within the city. These examples highlight the social purpose of curatorial decision making, which aims to honestly depict the “real Glasgow” whilst at the same time sup-

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porting displays which help to construct a sense of community cohesiveness amongst the “People” (Carnegie et al, 1998). The People’s Palace, Glasgow and the People’s Story Edinburgh deal with historic events on a “domestic scale”, aided by the individual testimonies that reinforce the intimate during the museum visit. As noted above, both museums highlight gender difference, although Glasgow goes further in focusing on domestic violence and the subsequent hardships inflicted on families, often linked to alcohol abuse. New displays entitled “Violence against Women” within Glasgow’s flagship museum Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, use domestic violence on a local scale in Glasgow to illustrate a global concern. In this way, individuals’ stories of domestic strife serve to create a collective narrative on the need for social change. Although the collections within The People’s History Museum, Manchester reflect local events and people, the museum carries a universal political message of working class democratic struggle. Its strap line reminds the viewer ‘there have always been ideas worth fighting for. “Join a march through time following Britain’s struggle for democracy over two centuries”.4 This idea of a “march” through time invites visitors to actively engage with the People’s history as evidenced within. Key collections include a world leading number of trade union and friendly society banners which were carried on marches and were intended to carry the message that unity is strength. Contemporary banners which, for example, challenge racism within society, are also collected and displayed giving continuity to an art form which has traditionally been associated with peoples’ protest as well as promoting unity. The museum argues that “some museum buildings are worth fighting for” having recently led a sustained campaign to gain funding and support for the new building where they are currently housed. It is interesting to note that there remains a sense of a need to fight for the continuance and development of museums that represent this aspect of local history. A question might be: at what point might they become redundant in a contemporary society where such divisions are less apparent and the labour movement less radicalised. The new museum has a dedicated community gallery open to individuals and groups to mount their own exhibitions. Despite their union and collectivist community focus, they too struggle to define and determine exactly who are “the People”, in this context they are those involved in “the struggle”. The focus on collectivism can exclude

4

http://www.phm.org.uk/ accessed 7th March 2011; accessed 7th March, 2011.

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a larger number of ordinary people who have never been involved in forms of protest (Carnegie 1996). A newcomer to the People’s category, opening in 2011, is the People’s Republic Gallery in the new Liverpool Museum. It is interesting in this context as the Museum of Liverpool is one of a number of nationally funded museums in Liverpool whereas all of the other “People’s” museums in the United Kingdom are supported by local government or have trust status (or both). Liverpool has a social and industrial profile similar to Glasgow and an equally problematic present. Like Glasgow, Liverpool benefited from holding the title of European City of Culture. Glasgow was the first city in the United Kingdom to be so nominated in 1990 and Liverpool more recently in 2008. In both cases, City of Culture status was awarded in recognition of the efforts made by both cities to move from a sunken industrial past to a vibrant future based on culture. Like Glasgow, Liverpool has strong collections which reflect its industrial past and the private collecting practices of wealthy industrials keen to embrace the art and culture practises of the aristocracy. Liverpool remains one of the poorest cities in Britain. The People’s Republic gallery merges the domestic life themes of the People’s Story and the People’s Palace with the labour and trade union history more akin to Manchester’s People’s History Museum. The gallery aims to reflect life in the city and impacts of social and cultural change. Above all, it explores what it means to be “Liverpudlian” within a politicised frame of the “People”. The addition of the word ‘republic’, with its connotations of group unity, identity and democratic control is of course to belie the realities of present day life in the city. It does however provide a space for debate about Liverpool’s past and present, potentially lacking in the culture-led regeneration.

B UT W HO ARE

THE

P EOPLE ? W HO I S

THE

P EASANT ?

Despite all four “People’s” museums’ (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Liverpool) claims to be about the “People”, for the “People”, the problems of “who are the People” remain. By taking a “broad brush” view of what constituted the working class, a recent exhibition at the People’s History Museum, entitled “Death and the Working Class”, carried confusing messages of assumed wealth, centred as it was around the documents and material culture that had survived. As I have written elsewhere (Carnegie 2006), as so termed “working class cultures” are arguably less materially driven, the existing material culture tends to be that which was collectively owned, as was the case in the exhibition discussed above. Typically, such collectively owned objects include banners created for,

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and commissioned by, trade unions and carried as symbols of collective identity Or, they represent the products of “working class labour” which, in industrialised cultures such as Glasgow and Liverpool, might be locomotives or ships and as such need to be remembered symbolically. Resulting exhibitions draw on individual memory to create personally affecting links to the “collective” or largely absent material culture. Through such memorialising of memory, personal tool collections, for example, become the conduit between the man and the ship he worked on and as such humanise the scale. The People seemed to be broadly defined against what they are not: the ruling classes. Yes these museums are all funded to some extent by the current ruling classes and so all of these museums and galleries are spaces given over to explore alternative history, without them impacting on museum cultures elsewhere and with little universal debate. The “People” are socially constructed to create unity in the present and to give validity to the museum. A conference held to celebrate the centenary of the Romanian Peasant Museum, Bucharest, Romania (2006) posed a very real question in post-Ceauşescu‘s Romania. The debate on who was now the ‘peasant’ in a post communist society, and how this repositioning would impact on the direction the museum would take went beyond the semantics of the “People’s” museums. Mihailescu (2006:17) notes that the name “Museum of the Romanian Peasant” remains problematic and limiting and staff regret not simply calling the museum the Peasant’s Museum, which has interesting parallels with the “People’s museums” and allows for a looser interpretation of the peasant as “everyman”. The peasant, Mihailescu maintains, represents “universal humanity” and “traditional man” and can be seen as reclaiming the “authentic man” within the European context, and one who is also viewed as Christian (2006:18). A key aim of the museum remains that of healing the scars of a post-communist Romania, so that the museum which was once a celebration of communism, now houses a collection of paintings and toppled statues of the fallen Ceauşescu in a basement gallery which, whilst not always open to the public, serves to consign him to the basement of history. The upstairs galleries determine that the “peasant” becomes the “folk” with displays which look at crafts, folk-life with an emphasis on a lost (and essentially rural) way of life. The importance of religion in the life of “the peasants” is explored symbolically within the displays, offered as an aspect of continuity in an otherwise fast changing world. For example, a man’s white shirt is displayed in the shape of the cross, this interpretation suggesting that religion is ever present even in the everyday. That debates need to be held within the French edu-

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cated academic folklorists and anthropologists now responsible for managing and re-interpreting the Museum of the Romanian Peasant, highlights the real sense of rupture in society, as well as the need for that political and cultural change to be reflected in the state run museum. In this case and in the Terror Haza in Budapest and the Rising Museum in Warsaw, the displays are of local significance but reflect or construct ideologies that have global impact and significance. The Terror Haza in Budapest and the Warsaw Rising Museum provide interesting examples of museums that have been introduced by current political regimes and housed within symbolically important buildings, to expose the political acts of previous occupations. The Terror Haza unites contemporary Hungarians by reflecting on negative impacts of both communism and fascism. The Rising Museum opened in 2004 to commemorate the Polish resistance culminating in the 1944 Rising. Both museums are memorials to those whose lives were lost or whose ways of life were changed forever. In both museums, the “People” depicted are victims of political regimes and of war, reclaimed for modern audiences. Both museums evidence strong design and financial investment and reflect cultural change and an emerging new nationalism aimed at uniting people in the present. Interestingly, the Rising museum holds a children’s education gallery which focuses on the “little insurgent” and encourages child visitors to engage with the concept through play. Clearly in this case, by making the “the child” the “people” as well, the museum is able to reach, and some might argue, politicise childhood. As with the other museums considered here, both The Terror Haza and the Rising Museum rely on giving a name, a voice, a face to the fallen, using the words and images of real people which can create links between the past and the present, through constructing continuities and highlighting moments of rupture. It is tempting to ponder on who is not “the people”/“the peasant” or who has ceased to be included in this term, banished to the basement of history as Ceauşescu in the Museum of the Romanian Peasant. Where does this leave “the People” of other political persuasions, of other faiths, or the collaborators, the now enemies of the state? In the “Peoples” museums within the UK, the irony is that the organisers, funders, curators, governments are not “the People” and inevitably, despite the community consultation processes and the oral testimony and the “peopling” of displays, these spaces are constructed by “non-people”, the largely middle-class body of museum personnel. Thus, these museums are no less a political act than the Romanian or other European case studies which provide a focus for current political ideologies. I

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will now conclude with some comments on the impact of such constructed pasts on individuals and communities.

C ONCLUSION This chapter has focused on museums whose purpose is to reflect on and construct the political pasts of ordinary “people”/“peasants”, either in the domestic arena or in times of strife and acute political and cultural change. However, all provide examples of the lives of ordinary people as experienced through the actual testimonies of people whose lived experience is reflected within the displays. All highlight how curatorial agendas reflect the organisational and funding bodies, and political will of contemporary cultures which influence and shape museum representations. All the museums in this chapter draw on local case studies to make general and global statements about the impacts of events on people, and provide a forum to meet and mourn and to share in the “stories” and life histories presented therein. In so doing, all reflect a kind of “everyman”. By being able to look into the eyes of “real” people, visitors can see themselves reflected. As discussed earlier, sometimes local people seek to “stigma manage” and to protect themselves and their locality from interpretations that expose them. Topics such as alcohol abuse, domestic violence or impacts of war may expose individuals, but can actually unite communities and at least highlight that governments, through the forum of the museum, are seeking to address such issues in order to reflect on them or bring about change. In this way, as Fraser (2007) determines, by sharing their lives and allowing the darker side of their own experiences to be interpreted within the museum, individuals can feel they are participating and investing in the future, for the common good. As has been highlighted in this chapter, once people have given their story to the museum, it changes from a personal and intimate account of a time and place and becomes a part of a greater, and consciously constructed narrative. Thus, their individual account becomes a museum object, they become in effect curated people, and the subject becomes the interpretation for the object. At its best such individual acts of remembering can tell the untold stories, reclaim lost pasts and acts, and help visitors who may be drawn from other classes, communities or cultures to reflect on their own lives in the present. Within the historical context, oral testimonies are the bridge from the past to the present. As has been discussed, individual memories are crucial to the creation of collective memory and the creation of grand narratives of survival, conflict, insurgence,

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rebellion or collectivism. Ultimately then, can it argued that it in so doing, curating “People”, is for “the People’s common good”?

R EFERENCES Anderson, Benedict (1991): Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Barr, Jean (2005): Dumbing Down Intellectual Culture. Museum and Society 3: 98-114. Bauman, Zygmunt (2001): Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World. London: Polity. Bennett, Tony (1995): The Birth of the Museum. History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge. Bonnell, Jennifer & Roger I. Simon (2007): “Difficult” Exhibitions and Intimate Encounters. Museum and Society 5(2): 65-85. Carnegie, Elizabeth (1996): “Trying to Be an Honest Woman”. In: Kavanagh, Gaynor (Ed.): Making Histories in Museums. London: Leicester University Press; pp. 54-65. – (1998): Museos de Glasgow: Violencis Domestica, Verguenza y Silencio. Historia Antroplogia y Fuentes Orales, no. 20 Traumas del siglo XX, 1. – (2006): “It Wasn’t All Bad”: Representations of Working Class Cultures within Social History Museums and their Impacts on Audiences. Museum and Society 4(2): 69-83. Carnegie, Elizabeth et al. (Eds.) (1998): The People’s Palace Book of Glasgow. Edinburgh: Mainstream. Clark, Helen & Elizabeth Carnegie (2003): “She Was Aye Workin”: Memories of Women in the Tenements of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Oxford: White Cockade. Clifford, James (1984): Introduction. Partial Truths. In Clifford, James & George E. Marcus (Eds.): Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press; pp. 1-26. Dubois, Lindsay (2000): Memories Out of Place. Dissonance and Silence in Historical Accounts of Working Class Argentines. Oral History 28(1): 75-82. Edensor, Tim (2002): National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg. Fleming, David (1996): Making City Histories. In: Kavanagh, Gaynor (Ed.): Making Histories in Museums. London: Leicester University Press; pp. 131143.

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Fraser, John (2007): Living in Fear. Leaving the Person Out of Personal Stories. Curator 50(4): 375-377. Green, Anna (2004): Individual Remembering and “Collective Memory”. Theoretical Presuppositions and Contemporary Debates. Oral History 32: 35-44. Hammersley, Martyn (2000): Taking Sides in Social Research. London: Routledge. Herman, Judith L. (1992): Trauma and Recovery. The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Glenview: Basic Books. Hetherington, Kevin (2000): New Age Travellers. Vanloads of Uproarious Humanity. London: Cassell. Kavanagh, Gaynor (1996): Making Histories in Museums. London: Leicester University Press. Kurkowska-Budzan, Marta (2006): The Warsaw Rising Museum. Polish Identity and Memory of World War II. MARTOR, the Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review 11 http://Martor.Memoria.Ro/Index.Php?Location=View_Article&Id=191. Marcus, George E. (1984): Contemporary Problems of Ethnography in the Modern World System. In: Clifford, James & George E. Marcus (Eds.): Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press; pp. 165-193. Mihailescu, Vintila (2006): The Romanian Peasant Museum and the Authentic Man. MARTOR, the Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review 11: 15-29. Nixon, Sean & Du Gay, Paul (2002): “Who Needs Cultural Intermediaries?”. Cultural Studies 16(4): 495-500. O’Neill, Mark (2007): Kelvingrove: Telling Stories in a Treasured Old/New Museum. Curator 50 (4): 379-399. – (1996): Making Histories of Religion. In: Kavanagh, Gaynor (Ed.): Making Histories in Museums. London: Leicester University Press; pp. 188-199. Pieterse, Nederveen, J. (1997): Multiculturalism and Museums: Discourse about Others in the Age of Globalisation. Theory Culture Society 14: 123-146. Rosaldo, Renato (1984): From the Door of his Tent: The Fieldworker and the Inquisitor. In: Clifford, James & George E. Marcus (Eds.): Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press; pp. 77-97. Rose, Susan D. (2004): Naming and Claiming: The Integration of Traumatic Experience and the Reconstruction of Self in Survivors’ Stories of Sexual Abuse. In: Rogers, Kim Lacy & Selma Leydesdorff (Eds.): Life Stories of Survivors. Trauma. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers; pp. 160-179.

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Sánchez-Carretero, Cristina & Peter Jan Margry (Eds.) (2011): Grassroots Memorials. The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death. New York: Berghahn. Silberman, Neil (2004): Beyond Theme Parks and Digitized Data. What Can Cultural Heritage Technologies Contribute to the Public Understanding of the Past. Ename Center for Public Archaeology and Heritage Presentation, Ename, Belgium. Thomson, Alistair (1998): Anzac Memories. Putting Popular Memory Theory Into Practice in Australia. In: Thomson, Alistair & Robert Perks (Eds.): The Oral History Reader. London: Routledge; pp. 244-254. Terror Haza Museum (2003): Terror Haza Catalogue. Budapest. Troulliot, Michael-Rolph (1996): Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon. Zeldin,Theodore (1995): An Intimate History of Humanity. Oxford: Vintage. Websites http://www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk/Venues/The-People-s-Story.aspx, acessed 7th March, 2011. http://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/museums/our-museums/peoples-palace/aboutthe-People%27s%20Palace/Pages/home.aspx, accessed 7th March, 2011. http://www.phm.org.uk/, accessed 7th March 2011.

Remembering the Home The Intricate Effects of Narrative Inheritance and Absent Memory on the Biographical Construction of Orphanhood D ELYTH E DWARDS

I NTRODUCTION For my doctoral research, I conducted (auto)biographical interviews with women who grew up in a catholic children’s home in Belfast, Northern Ireland during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Being the daughter of an orphan, being part of an orphan’s biography, meant that I had inherited a narrative of what it was and is to be an orphan from my mother. Yet, throughout my childhood and adulthood, I remained aware of the narratives and memories of orphanhood discursively circulated within culture. This is where the article begins, with a consideration of the grand narratives of the orphan, the fictional and the somewhat factual. The fictional being the great literary work of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and the factual being the media stories and biographies of the abused orphan disseminated within the context of Ireland. The article shifts to consider how these discursive memories have intruded upon the autobiographical space of the participants, primarily owing to the inaccessibility of familial inheritance to the orphan. The idea of the absent memory becomes the interesting point here, I reflect on the way it impinges on the orphans, most notably that this absence underlies their biographical narratives, and that for some their being, their very existence in the world is the absent memory within the biological families that are unknown to them. The article concludes with a contemplation of the silence and legacy of absence bequeathed by the orphan parent and inherited by the post-orphan generation. The biographical void of the orphan’s story remains, it only widens over time and for future generations.

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H EGEMONY

OF THE

G RAND N ARRATIVE

Like others, I have grown up with what I understand to be grand narratives of the orphan1, such as Dickens’ Oliver Twist and the more contemporary narrative of Little Orphan Annie, the 1920’s comic strip character who was portrayed in the 1982 film adaptation. Such characters have been depicted not only in literature and in comic strips, but also in film, television and in musicals in the West End and on Broadway. The story is constructed upon both of these protagonists facing severe hardship in the care of the workhouse and the orphanage, only to find their happy endings when they become saved from the hell and identity of orphanhood through adoption by Mr. Bronlow and Daddy Warbucks, respectively. Our understanding from such representations is that orphans are forever children who are most likely uneducated, abused, sad and victimised. They can only escape the misery and embarrassment of orphanhood by being taken out of it. These narratives have become grand because of their authorial nature since the Victorian era.2 This is the only story that has been told and which we have internalised as part of a legitimate body of knowledge. They are history. Although they are fictional characters, somehow they have become treated as factual representations of who and what an orphan is. The institutional care of orphaned, abandoned or abused children, perceived to be in “moral danger”, has had a long history on the Island of Ireland and those who have been in institutional care run by religious orders have had to endure a “low status” within Irish society (Ferguson 2007) 3. The orphan became the “gro-

1

Throughout this article I use the term orphan to refer to children who not only lost one or both parents through death, but also the children who were abandoned and placed in institutional care (see Peters 2000 for a detailed discussion of the term). However, I am aware of the widely accepted use of the term that refers only to those who have lost both parents through death.

2

Quoting Derrida (1981), Peters (2000: 26) asserts that “[t]he orphan then can be read as text; a supplement in which is embodied difference within a notion of sameness. The orphan as supplement functions then in the same way that Derrida conceives of the pahrmakon (scapegoat) which acts as ‘both remedy and poison’; self-introduced ‘into the body of discourse with all its ambivalence’”. Peters provides a detailed account of the Victorian idea of orphanhood presented in literature and their function within the discourse.

3

When I use the term Ireland, I am referring to both the North and South, as many of the catholic run institutions worked across the border. Furthermore, they were all created for the same purposes and conducted their care of children in the same manner.

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tesque other” and the “moral dirt” of Irish society who needed to be cleansed of their parent’s sins4 through “appropriate regimes of moral rehabilitation” (Ferguson 2007: 132). This widespread narrative has inevitably lost its credibility over the years and its underlying Victorian irrationality has been exposed. But a further and more current understanding has recently emerged in Ireland, which only adds strength to the grand narrative of shame. On the 20th May 2010, a report was published in the Republic of Ireland entailing an inquiry into the abuse of children in residential care throughout Ireland’s history. Prior to this report, there had been other publications, which had documented such claims, including the autobiographies of former children in care. These accounts consist of a protagonist who endures and survives heart wrenching sexual, emotional and physical abuse and deprivation of all sorts whilst in the care of catholic religious orders. Smith (2008) labels this discourse of historical abuse in residential childcare as the “master narrative”. Like in Australia5, the public discourse in Ireland has “largely been about institutional abuses, as a revelation of trauma and injustice” (Murphy 2010: 308). Inevitably, there has been great media interest and speculation surrounding this topic and such memories are gaining cultural dominance and recognition because of their distribution in the media. Is Ireland currently experiencing what Plummer (2001) would conceptualise as a “memory habit”? Memory becomes a habit when it “starts to be seen as much less of an inner psychological phenomenon, and much more of a socially shared experience. [...] It is what we have said so often that we literally come to believe it as true [...] Long afterwards, when the event has been lost, what we are left with is only this ‘habit’, this ‘story’” (Plummer 2001: 234). Both habits of remembering, the fictional as well as the factual, contribute to what could be described as the legitimised discourse of orphanhood (Foucault 1972). Frazer argues that the stories people tell of their experience, in this case their biography as an orphan, “can only be expressed and understood through the categories available to them in discourse” (Frazer 1990; quoted in Davies and Harré 1990: 4). Is “Oliver” the only category available, the only story that can be produced? As Foucault (1980) proposed, there can be spaces, moments of re-

4

For example, having a child out of wedlock was understood as sinful and immoral. Therefore it was best that the children, the products of such an act be placed in the care of the church for their own moral safety (see Ferguson 2007 for further discussion on this topic).

5

The Forgotten Australians report was published in 2004 after an inquiry was held into the “institutional and out of home-care” of children by the Senate Community Affairs References Committee (See Murphy 2010).

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sistance against the grand narrative, but he calls these subjugated discourses “naive knowledges” because of their low rank within hierarchies of knowledge. Let me give a personal example of such a “naive knowledge”. Juxtaposed to the narrative of the orphan as the Other, I am also the daughter of an orphan. My mother and her sisters were raised in a children’s home in Belfast. Throughout my childhood, my mother would tell stories of her upbringing in what she always referred to as the “Home”. These would be funny stories and sometimes fond recollections. I cannot recognise my mother in the grand narrative. This inheritance conflicts with the grand narrative previously described, and temporarily places distance between her personal narrative and the hegemonic discourse. But this distance remains only for a moment. The grand narrative is too powerful and its position of dominance is sustained. My own narrative inheritance and the (auto)biographic narratives of my participants suggest that stories outside the hegemony of the grand narrative do exist;6 it is just a matter of listening. This can be problematic for the orphan tale because as I explain in the following sections, my doctoral investigation has revealed that because of having to face the absent memories within their own past/present, not only are their individual stories permeated by grand narratives through cultural memories, but for some in the sample, this impingement upon their narrative inheritance results in their lived biography of orphanhood becoming and remaining a legacy of absence for following generations.

C ULTURAL R EMEMBERING AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL F ORGETTING [The] memory crisis in modern Western cultures … is not only about the process of memory as it used to be understood (i.e. essentially, the idea of storage of knowledge in, and retrieval from, a warehouse), but also about the content of memory (what is remembered, and what not). That is to say, the crisis is about the very notion of memory. This notion turned out to be based on highly culture-specific practices of remembering. And as cultures change, so do their memory practices and what is worth and desirable to be remembered (Brockmeier 2002: 20).

6

I have written in the unpublished thesis about the importance of such knowledges. But, due to the purpose of this paper, namely, the hegemony of the grand narrative and its impact on peripheral remembering, I do not venture into this debate here.

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Memory can be regarded as both a social and individual practice and can be analysed as such (Plummer 2001). In other words “[o]ur narratives of the self are partly tied up with what is being represented in public about parallel experiences” (Murphy 2010: 307). This inevitably results in the story being told with “blended voices”, made up of our own voice and the voice of others (Ochs and Capps 1996). Kundera agrees and writes that “memory never captures authentic experience” because “remembering is a form of forgetting” (Kundera 1981, cited in Ochs and Capps 1986: 21). As explained in the previous section, the orphan “narrative is articulated and dispersed through a culture’s countless discursive registers from myth and fairy tales to literature, film” (Brockmeier 2002: 27). It was also acknowledged that publications and biographies of what orphanhood is have shifted “from private to public consciousness” (Fine 1988: 44). In the present context, the crisis consists in not knowing whose memory is present in our consciousness surrounding the construction of orphanhood. As Brockmeier states for memory in general, crisis has permeated all frames of memory, even autobiographical remembering is “about forgetting: forgetting about most of what happened in one’s lifetime” (Brockmeier 2002: 22). To what extent do cultural remembering practices influence the forgotten spaces of our autobiographies? It became apparent during the course of the research that elements of the grand narrative had crept into the remembering practices of my participants and at moments they constructed their selves and their life stories by drawing on larger, public and literary narratives (Murphy 2010). One of the interviewees, Linda, delves directly into the discourse and uses the appropriate language to recognise her “self who was”7 as being the character “Orphan Annie”: I remember I used to stand at them gates every Thursday waiting for me mother to come. You know like, like little Orphan Annie, you know. 8 7

I am making reference to Barthes (1975) here, who in his discussion on the structural analysis of narrative, distinguished between “the self who writes”, “the self who is” and “the self who writes”. This way of thinking about the act of narrating illustrates how the participant became an “object” to herself, historically, socially and biographically (Mead 1967).

8

Linda seems unaware of how her statement contradicts the traditional and widely understood meaning of the orphan, simultaneously being an orphan yet waiting for her mother who made frequent visits to Nazareth House. Her parents were both living. One could conclude from this that the orphan discourse is so powerful that it has to be imitated in one way or another with flaws, contradictions and all. However, the importance here is how the participants construct themselves and this research suggests

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Linda is aware that I, as a listener and participant in the discourse, and you as a reader, recognise the fairytale and identity of “Orphan Annie” and so uses this accepted discourse to confront and construct her “self who was”. Empathy is used as a method for narrating here; she concurrently shows empathy toward this character and seeks it from me. Jane, another participant provides a further example of empathetic narrating, but she empathises with the real life characters who have publicised their experiences. The following quote depicts the moment Jane decided to depart from her narrating during the interview to search for a book she was reading: … where’s that book [.] [she has a quick search for this book] that book I don’t know where I put it. It’s a true story. No I think it’s out ‘ere [she gets up and goes into the kitchen] oh ‘ere it is. [She fetches the book from within the kitchen]. That’s a true story and that’s about two boys, he’s one, and these, been in so many homes and beaten and oh it was terrible. It was ‘oh god it reminds me of the convent’ you know. I tend to, buy books like that ((laughs)). The story of cruelty being circulated via this book is impinging upon Jane’s understanding of her self and her remembering of the Home and penetrates her narrative. She relates to the experiences of these authors through the medium of mass publication. She has based her biographical construction partly on her own personal memory, but also within an “existing public discourse representing [her] experiences” as an orphan (Murphy 2010: 299). This proves Brockmeier’s theory to be correct, namely, that “even when we are individually remembering, we are recalling the memories of a social community” (Brockmeier 2002: 24). As Jane constructs her story, memory becomes told “in relation to existing narratives circulating in public domains” (Murphy 2010: 307). Another interviewee, Pauline, provides another example of how a particular experience outside of one’s autobiography can enter a biographical narrative. In the quote below, she discusses the topic of sexual abuse: It’s this other abuse I hate [referring to sexual abuse]. Oh God I hate it with a vengeance. They’re not all guilty of it like. But I mean. They just, that’s why they went into them professions, them oul’ Christian Brothers and all and

that they view their selves as orphans. This supports the previous statement that the term orphan should not solely be used for children whose parent/s had died, but should encompass children that were abandoned and placed in care (see footnote 1 of this article; see also Peters 2000).

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priests they would be able to get access to children, you know. I hate that, I hate that abuse I really do. Well I at least I was a victim of physical abuse but not that you know. Despite having no relevance to her biographical experience, Pauline is resolute in mentioning this “other abuse”. She references it in relation to how lucky she was that she did not suffer like the victims whose experiences are widely circulated in the news and within published biographies. Concurrently, in the present space of the (auto)biography, Pauline takes this discursive technique further and places her “self who was” in a potentially dangerous situation: There used to be a oul’ boy, uh Jeff Reilly he used to be knocking about. God when you think of it now he could have been an oul’ pervert. In light of the stories that have surfaced about the persons who worked in care homes, she positions this character of “Jeff Reilly” as possibly (because that is all he can be) being an “oul’ pervert” and aligns herself with the victim. The victim as a character is obliged to appear somewhere in the biography of orphanhood, even through a “what if” approach. The memories of other orphans have been used in the participant’s remembering processes to make sense not only of their experiences but also of who they are (Murphy 2010). I contend that what is taking place here is the inheritance of narrative, a cultural and especially in the case of Ireland, a national narrative. The fact that it is cultural makes it no less of an inheritance. These publicised stories fulfill a void or more precisely, an uncertainty in the orphans’ stories where a lack of narrative inheritance stemming from familial remembering has left them to seek knowledge elsewhere.

I NHERITING N OTHINGNESS

OR I NHERITING THE

O BSCURE

In the following quote, Goodall discusses the term “narrative inheritance”. Writing from his own experiences of inheriting and not inheriting familial stories, he describes what he understands the concept to be9: 9

In brief, Goodall discovered, through a diary bequeathed to him by his father after his death, that his father had not been merely working for the U.S government as he made out, but had worked as a spy during the Cold war. Inheriting this familial narrative in this way left Goodall devastated, revealing in his writing that he felt “betrayed by the truth” (see Goodall 2005).

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I use this term to describe the afterlives of the sentences used to spell out the life stories of those who came before us. What we inherit narratively from our forbearers provides us with a framework for understanding our identity through theirs. It helps us see our life grammar and working logic as an extension of, or a rebellion against, the way we story how they lived and thought about things, and it allows us to explain to others where we come from and how we were raised in the continuing context of what it all means. We are fundamentally homo narrans – humans as storytellers – and a well-told story brings with it a sense of fulfilment and completion (Goodall 2005: 497).

He also writes, “narrative inheritance refers to stories given to children by and about family members” and as a consequence it “touches everything, one way or another, in our lives” (Goodall 2005: 492 and 503). From a similar standpoint to Goodall’s, McNay (2009) has also written about “narrative inheritance” partly from her own familial experience.10 According to her, this inheritance is made up of “the stories and family lore that parents and other relatives pass on to children about the family” (McNay 2009: 1178). What both of these authors’, who’s experiences will be discussed throughout the remainder of the article, share in their writings on this subject is the understanding that all families have “story lines that travel through family genealogies and social histories to whatever distant memory first gave birth to our original forbearer’s tale” (Goodall 2005: 510). I argue that these story lines are lacking for orphans who have no information of who their mother or father was. Some of the orphans interviewed for this research project have no association to a past family or genealogy; sections of their birth certificates remain blank, usually devoid of a paternal name. This was Coleen’s experience. She presented a reoccurring example of the problems for self and story confronted by the orphan, caused by a lack of narrative inheritance, or the inheritance of nothingness. Coleen will never inherit a narrative about her father, or even know his name because of her mother’s passing; a mother who made the decision to keep this detail of Coleen’s biography a secret, leaving Coleen wondering for the remainder of her life11:

10 Like Goodall, McNay inherited a narrative about her father following his death, when speaking to her mother one day. The secrecy revolved around the truth that her father had been a “home child” who was sent to Canada as a child from Scotland to work and live (see McNay 2009 for a detailed description about discovering her “father’s Secret”). 11 When questioning the ethics surrounding the issues faced by the child, McNay quotes Poulos (2008: 53) who suggested that “the power of story trumps the power of the se-

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N12: I’m not sure whether that was in the convent or, or in the um the hospital. I don’t think it was in the hospital I can’t remember seeing her in the ho[spital]. I must have been very young because, this one time, cause uh I couldn’t move then so I must have been very bad, the TB must have been still there or something I don’t know. And these two army lads came, walking up the ward, with this cot, and this doll you know and gave them to me. I: Oh. N: So I was wondering whether one of them was my dad ((laughs)). I: Oh really? N: Well who knows who knows. Her method of negotiating this absence has been to retain the memory of these two “army lads” and to continue speculating whether one of them was her father. She has created her own narrative about her father out of her memories, both present and absent. Coleen negotiates the absence further by adopting a comical perspective. This strategy of humour is common “when confronted with history, or with a communication crisis that will become history – which is frequently the case in family histories and usually the case with incompatible identity narratives” (Goodall 2005: 508). Coleen divulged during the interview that she wishes to embark upon genealogical research in order to gain some sense of “who I am” and “where I came from”. She feels the need now to create her own biography instead of having one created for her through the grand narrative. Other interviewees have been fortunate to inherit some sort of narrative from siblings that assists their biographical (re)construction. In the quote below, Janice describes when she and her sisters were undergoing preparation to be taken to the Home after the death of their mother. However, instead of describing her own memory, she relates a narrative inherited from her older sister Clare: Clare says she remembers us going to the local shop and being kitted out 13 because Clare remembers us running around bare feet. So the poverty was quite bad. This is not an absent memory in the sense that she did not experience it first hand or that it is a secret; she does not remember that moment or, in fact, she has

cret” and that “the ethical move . . . is to tell the story in ways that will move us toward healing” (quoted in McNay 2009: 1185). 12 N=Narrator and I=Interviewer 13 “Kitted out” is a vernacular term used to refer to being dressed, given nice and usually new clothes to wear.

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forgotten it. Does a forgotten memory not become somehow a space of absence? Janice feels that this inheritance is important enough to incorporate into her biographical space and is able to use it to conduct an analysis of what life was like for them before entering the children’s home, a time and place she cannot remember herself but which is imperative to her biography and the point where she begins her telling. Joanna provides another example of inheriting some sort of a story from a sibling; in this case she inherits obscurity from her brother: I would have asked my older brother cause he would always have said it to us that there was always a man there when he was, cause he was let me see Larry would be about 5 years older than me so he would have been about 9 or 10 and he said there was always a man about. But we would never have met him, you know with being younger like. Or remembered him. At this point in her narrative, Joanna is reflecting on this male character, which may or may not have been her father. Like in Coleen’s case, her mother refused to divulge information about her father and his identity remains a secret. She has forgotten his presence in the house, yet her older brother has assured her that this character existed at this time in her biography because he exists within his memory. The void in her biography and her need to fill it has meant that she has to depend upon her brother’s obscure or hazy memories and that she has had to construct her self-understanding from this memory rather than from her own. Human memory can be distorted, selective and sometimes faulty in what is remembered (Portelli 1998; Yow 2005). The argument here is that for Joanna and her need for a background narrative, her constructed “life story provides a clear and ordered record of personal truth that, of necessity, consists of both ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’” (Atkinson 1998: 20). It has been argued that our “story needs to be coherent enough to form an integrated self: having an integrated self, having a narrative [...] is an ontological necessity” (Murphy 2010: 297). In other words, narratives are an “ontological condition of social life” and are thus critical to identity (Somers cited in Murphy 2010: 301). When considered within this context of narrative inheritance and the reliance on the remembering of others, the already complex situation becomes even more multifaceted and questions arise about the extent to which inherited memories should be trusted. Nevertheless, they continue to fulfill human needs despite questions surrounding their authenticity. This need is both the desire for identity formation and for a foundation upon which to form one’s identity. In instances when we do inherit familial narratives, Goodall (2005: 497) writes, “we don’t always inherit that sense of completion. We too often inherit a

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family’s unfinished business, and when we do, those incomplete narratives are given to us to fulfill”. This has been the case for a number of the orphans of my study. The story lines of genealogy begin with them. There is no way of knowing the stories of those who came before them. Despite having nostalgic tendencies, their nostalgia is usually devoid of content, it is absent and there is no way of retrieving that link to a past.

ABSENT M EMORY

AND THE

O RPHAN

‘La mémoire absente,’ the absent memory, is ‘la mémoire trouée,’ a memory filled with holes or gaps, both symbolic and real (Raczymow 1986, quoted in Fine 1988: 45).

An absent memory is a memory devoid of content, an absence, a blank and in some cases a taboo (Raczymow 1991).14 As considered in the previous section on inheriting nothingness or inheriting the obscure, absent memories become “family secrets, known to some members of the family, not known to other members, and, often, intuited by still others” (McNay 2009: 1179). In the previous section, I discussed how, for the orphan in particular, the problem is “not knowing one’s origins” and therefore “the struggle to compose a sense of identity from fragmented memories” is pertinent to their experiences (Murphy 2010: 302). Many of the participants of this research have no siblings and were placed into the Home when they were born, or a number of weeks after and therefore have no memory of their mother or family life. Orphans face “real” gaps or holes in their genealogy (Raczymow 1991). They have no family trees because there “is no trace of anyone before” (Raczymow 1991: 104). This loss of roots or these “missing links” (Raczymow 1991) have resulted in what can only be described as a “biographical void”. But the relationship between identity and memory has been particularly vexed in research about people who grew up in care, precisely because their stories have often been ruptured, especially when they have fragmentary knowledge about their family of origin (Murphy 2010: 297).

14 Raczymow (1986) has presented his own absent memory as a new kind of memory, “a memory that he will never know, but at the same time he must not forget” (Fine 1988: 56).

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How absent memories have emerged in my participants’ biographical narratives and how they have dealt with such absence varies. Some have claimed them; others have accepted the silence and base their selves and stories upon that silence. Like the participants of Murphy’s (2010) research, some of the orphans interviewed for my doctoral research have sought access to their records in order to seek biographical information. Brockmeier (2002) refers to these documents as memory texts that help autobiographical construction. One interviewee, Diane, provides a typical example of claiming an absent memory in this way: Oooh but it’s very sad that you get to the age of 60, before you’re complete because do you know what my biggest thing was? My identity. And there’s some girls that I grew up with, God love them will never find their fathers. Never. Diane sought out her narrative inheritance for the autobiographical book she is writing and during her investigation she succeeded in tracing her parents’ biographies and uncovered the story of their relationship. She has reconstructed part of her biographical void and despite having other, unanswered questions about her past; she claims feelings of completion, not closure,15 as a result of her research. For others, the absence remains and they choose to let it endure. Pauline explains how she coped with her absent memory of her father by “switching off”. In the following quote, her daughter Bernadette confronts her with the absent memory and in doing so is seeking her own narrative inheritance in trying to open up a discussion about a grandfather she has never known: My father was supposed to have been a bread server. Bernadette come in and said to me “Mum do you not want to know your father?” and I’ll say I don’t, I never bothered before because I think I switched off or you know. Fear can often be the reason why orphans choose not to pursue absent memories, fear of finding out the reason why they were put into care, the circumstances of their conception or what kind of people their parents were. Murphy (2010) discovered through his research on orphans that discovering one’s origin can open a floodgate of emotion and, as some of his participants described, can sometimes become a burden; more of a burden than the absent memory itself. In most cases, memories are absent for reasons like the protection of others as well as other plausible excuses, such as a self-defence mechanism on the part of the person

15 Closure can never be fully achieved in situations when there can be no direct contact between generations. This is discussed further in the latter part of this section.

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silencing the memory (McNay 2009). Nevertheless, uncovering or claiming absent memories can have healing effects too, as McNay (2009) discovered when she researched her father’s past after he died. Her father was a “home child” 16 from Scotland who was sent to Canada under the guise as a labourer. Through a detailed investigation, she was able to construct the narrative her father had hid from her all of her life and by doing so she was able to fill a void from her past in the present. An argument has been put forward that no amount of searching a person who lacks familial narrative inheritance conducts will fill the voids in their biography (Goodall 2005). From this perspective, the orphan women will never know “the whole story” and the stories they construct may be far “richer and nuanced” than the ones inherited, but they will remain incomplete (Goodall 2005: 498). The only way to inherit a “whole story” is orally from the people involved. But for some orphans, this can be especially difficult for reasons already discussed and, in particular, when their being itself is the absent memory.

B EING THE ABSENT M EMORY Another consequence of absent memories for the orphan, especially for the illegitimate orphan, is that many are the absent memories. As stated earlier, absence of memory can be a consequence of the taboo surrounding the secret (Raczymow 1991). Some of the participants in this research embody the secrets that underline family narratives. Bridget, who was born illegitimately, is one of these participants. In the quote below she describes her uncle’s reaction to her presence when she traced and met members of her family for the first time: Now one of my mother’s brothers was very, indifferent to the whole thing and they were all very ind[ifferent], they were very much in denial.

16 McNay was unaware of what or who a “home child” was; hence she embarked on her research and discovered the story of such children. The “home child” refers to someone who was considered an orphan. McNay explains, “tens of thousands of destitute children who in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had been placed in orphan homes in Great Britain – thus, “home children” – and subsequently emigrated to Canada to work on farms where, it was hoped, they might achieve for themselves new and better lives. Most such children had been orphaned or abandoned in one of Britain’s great industrial cities” (McNay 2009: 1182). McNay was able to construct aspects of her father’s story from this enlightenment.

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It was difficult for Bridget’s uncle to accept the fact that his sister had had a child out of wedlock. This experience of being the illegitimate child, the stigmatised child, never mentioned or known within the family, was common amongst these participants. However, they each abided by and respected their mothers’ wishes, choosing to remain the absent memory by not asking too many questions or pushing for acceptance. Angie is a participant who provides an example. In the extract below, she (re)presents the autobiographical scene that occurred when she found her mother and confronted her in person as a stranger for the first time: So I said “were you ever in Belfast?” she said “oh no never, I was never in Belfast”. She went to Belfast to have me you see. But I think they brainwashed them then didn’t they? They didn’t want that secret out to anybody that they had a baby cause they went away to places like Belfast to have the baby. So she said uh “don’t worry” she says “about your mother” she says “she’s with you every day”. It was a weird yeah. But I thought to myself I was happy to know that like you know. So I didn’t bother again. Her mother indicated her awareness of knowing who Angie was, and in her own way claimed Angie as her absent memory. Angie accepted this gesture and left “happy”, knowing this acknowledgement. In spite of the fact that her status as the absent memory was still intact, Angie has been able to develop an “attitude” (Goodall 2005) towards the past, which has produced a shift in her autobiographical discourse. She no longer aligns her “self who was” or her story with “Oliver”. For others however, being the absent memory has led them closer toward the discourse of “Oliver” and bestowed upon them feelings of shame. They understand and (re)construct their self as the product of immorality, a discourse previously constructed for them. Pauline presents this understanding in the quote below: I don’t know why. I don’t know if its shame or stigma or just switch off mode. What is it? Humiliation maybe. But it was our, it was the sins of our parents. It wasn’t us. But it wasn’t me. But it was the sin, we paid the price for the sins of our parents.

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There is evidence that a great number of orphans change or alter their life (hi)stories and their childhoods because of the shame and stigma 17 attached to such a biography (Raftery & O’Sullivan 1999; Miller et al. 2005). During the course of this research, it has emerged that being raised in a Home away from the birth family is perceived by some of my participants as an abnormal attribute, which results in an abnormal biography that must be altered or hidden, even from their husbands and children. Being the absent memory has disrupted “the construction of narrative inheritance” and “the formation of identity in children growing up in those families” (McNay 2009: 1179). Narratives usually inherited through familial remembering are kept secret and are rarely approached by the children of orphans because of their mothers’ purposeful forgetting. In turn, this act of forgetting is brought on by the orphans awareness that “the construction of abused and looked after children as a “grotesque ‘Other’, as ‘moral dirt’ lingers” (Ferguson 2007: 137) and furthermore, because of overwhelming feelings of stigma and embarrassment at having retained the orphan status by not having escaped orphanhood like “Oliver”.

U N HÉRITAGE EN FORME D ’ ABSENCES 18: “A L EGACY IN THE F ORM OF ABSENCES ” This deeper story – this true story – that lived inside of the story I had lived on the outside of. Why didn’t he just tell me? Why didn’t he let me in? Why didn’t we talk about it? Why did he wait until he died to reveal himself, who he had really been, and what he had been doing all those years? I felt as if my whole life was turned inside out.I had been betrayed by truth (Goodall 2005: 495).

One strategy that has been employed by these orphans to avoid passing on narratives to their children has been silence and a refusal to disclose information concerning their home of origin. They possess “a treasure that they are unwilling or unable to share” (Niborski and Wieviorka 1983, quoted in Raczymow 1994:

17 Goffman (1986) defines a stigma as an attribute a person has that goes against cultural norms. These categories are made in relation to what Goffman calls the “normals”, those people who do not depart from societal expectations. Goffman explains that the identity of the stigmatised person becomes spoiled in social situations when the “normals” react to the stigmatised person during interaction. 18 This expression was coined by Erika Apfelbaum in her work on Holocaust memory (see Fine 1988:44).

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100). Instead of transmitting the memory, they “transmit the wounds of subjugation and displacement” (McNay 2009: 1179). The relational cost of not inheriting the narratives of orphanhood for the children of Irish orphans is threefold. First, there are the emotional consequences that could be faced when discovering the secret. Second, the orphan’s secret has manifested in their comportment towards their children leading to the children’s inability to understand their mothers’ behaviour. Finally, the children seek answers or stories about their mothers’ past from elsewhere, for example, from stories in the national newspapers. They construct their own legacy from such stories, whether they represent their mothers’ experiences or not. Each of these consequences will be considered with the use of examples from my own research and the experiences and writing of others. With regard to the first consequence, it must be noted that for several of the participants the absent memory has yet to be inherited by their children and grandchildren,19 but Goodall (2005) and McNay (2009) provide two good examples of the discovery and the impact this had on them. Goodall openly writes how discovering the “deeper story” of his father’s “toxic secret”20 after his death initially poisoned both his past and posthumous relationship with him (2005: 495). Not only did he reflect disapprovingly of his father in the present, but his memories of the past also became tainted by the secrets that were slowly unravelling and revealing themselves. As demonstrated in the quote at the beginning of this section, he began to question who he was to his father, what his father thought of him and why his father never trusted him. He also felt remorse because he began to shape his own narratives upon these absent memories, and told his son, as his own parents had told him, a story that betrayed the truth. He was mimicking what his father had done to him and thus the legacy in the form of absence was continued.

19 Others in the sample have openly shared their life (hi)story with their children from an early age, my mother would be included in this group. This difference has been discussed further within the unpublished thesis. The comment I make here with regards to discovery is in reference to those who have not inherited their orphan parent’s narrative. Goodall’s and McNay’s examples are given to provide the possibilities of what it may be like for those who remain in the dark about their mother’s orphanhood one day discovering the truth. 20 By no means am I suggesting that the concealed pasts of my participants are in anyway “toxic”, but what is evident is that the participants themselves believe that there is a toxicity in their past. The stigma they experienced, described earlier in the article, felt to them like a toxic secret.

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McNay accepted her parents silence about her father’s life but she admits this acceptance came with “a certain sense of loss and, yes, guilt” (2009: 1182). She felt guilt because she did not question his silence, but also loss because she was “being denied something to which she was entitled” (McNay 2009: 1183). In her article, she delves into detail about how the secret affected the relationship with her father, how he would turn away from her at times, leaving a wide emotional gap between them. In other words, how he oriented his behaviour towards her is significantly unforgettable. Wiesel, using the genre of the novel, highlights how post-Holocaust generations are “[a]fflicted by the unhealed wounds of memory” (Fine 1988: 41): Born after the war, I endure its effects. I suffer from an Event I did not even experience. Feeling of void: from a past that has made History tremble, I have retained only words (Wiesel 1985, quoted in Fine 1988: 41).

Others have also confronted the theme of absence and the real effect this had on them through literary forms and through the imaginary (for example, Henri Raczymow, see Fine 1988).21 This effect becomes the second consequence, which was evident in the research, how the orphans adjust their behaviour toward their children. Some of the children of my participants have inherited the trauma of the institution, without the memory. Joanna mentioned on numerous occasions during her interview that she “found it very hard to show emotion” to her children as they were growing up because of her experiences in the Home. Below, she gives an example of what happened when one of her sons approached her for affection one time: I remember the time Liam went to hug me and the words I said to me son was “oh God are you drunk or something?” and he was awful annoyed like you know. Because he just said to me “mammy give us a hug” you know and I said “what are you drunk or something?” ((laughs)). You know and it just dawned on me you know it was just, it hurt him like you know it did hurt him.

21 It must be noted that the participants chose the academic space – perhaps what they viewed as a safe space – I was offering to confront the absence in their biographies. They were willing to share their life stories with me (knowing I was a sociologist and an orphans’ daughter), for the sake of academia. Interestingly however, they refused to confront the absence with their family.

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Joanna chooses to keep parts of her story a secret and provides her children only with “bits and pieces” (Joanna). The above is an example of Joanna transmitting emotional damage from her past, from the institution, rather than the memory itself. If Joanna’s children gained a better understanding of her “surround” 22, they could appreciate their mother’s silence on matters of her upbringing and her actions towards them in the past could perhaps be rationalised in the present. Moments, such as that described in the above quote, would no longer be memories of rejection. Furthermore, knowledge of her background could also empower them to construct a narrative for themselves and in turn, for their children. The third consequence of the legacy for the children of silenced orphans is that those who are unable to seek inheritance from their mothers in order to piece together their own fragmented selves, have become more vulnerable and more dependent on other forms of inheritance, most notably cultural remembering. Narratives that we fail to inherit from within the family, we inherit elsewhere, for example from the media and the story of the orphan from Ireland’s past. This post-orphan generation is left to “mythologize” (Raczymow 1994) about their mothers’ biographies as well as their own. In the quote below, Joanna describes how her children approach the subject of abuse with her:

22 By using this term, Goodall is drawing on the work of Eric Eisenberg (2001), who “proposed a theory of identity that ‘connects a person’s communicative choices with their personal narratives, their personal narratives with their bodily experience of emotionality and mood, and each of the above with the environmental resources available for the creation and sustenance of particular identities’” (Eisenberg 2001: 542, quoted in Goodall 2005: 511). Goodall clarifies this theory further by writing: “When I think about what my father and mother inherited, both narratively and genetically, and when I consider the probable impact of world war and its resultant experimental pharmacology on my father, or what he went through every day of his clandestine life, or the demands of being a State Department wife in the 1950s and resultant mental illness of my mother, to say nothing about my parents deepening troubles with alcohol, I can better understand their “surround.” I can better appreciate how uncertainty and despair filtered into their silences and shaped their perceived need for keeping secrets, managing boundaries, pretending that some things never happened. I now find in my heart a sympathy, and a compassion for them, to replace what for too long I didn’t understand and so glossed over as shame” (Goodall 2005: 511). His newly acquired knowledge or family story enabled him to reinterpret past events, feelings and relationships. His initial feelings of betrayal eventually overtime and with reflection, transformed into an understanding of his parents’ choice to keep their secret.

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And it’s only recently you know with all the scandals and all coming out you know I kind of way have been talking to them about it you know. I says “but I was never sexually abused” I says but “mentally” I think psychologically I was abused you know and, I was beat a few times like really bad beatings. But now they listen to everything you know they listen to what’s, in the papers and all and I have to kind of way say to them ‘well that didn’t happen to me’ and things like that there and they say ‘still not on mammy’ like ‘it must have been hard’ and I says ‘look! what doesn’t kill yer” ((laugh)) ‘makes you stronger’ you know. But I remember Clare saying to me “god mammy did anything like that happen to you?” and I say “no no” you know. She would hear bits and pieces like you know. But I I mean they never would really ask you know. I think they know that I don’t like talking about it anyway you know. This example from Joanna highlights the importance narrative inheritance has in the construction of self for other generations and also underscores the importance personal narratives have in familial relations. Is she protecting her children, or is she actually protecting herself and her identity? Joanna did not want her children to identify her as the sexually abused orphan and so chose to divulge the memory that although she was raised within an institution, she was not abused in the way presented by the media. But she would discuss the matter no further. The secrecy shrouding Joanna’s biography and her revelation of “bits and pieces” have resulted in her children imagining stories and seeking inheritance and understanding from elsewhere. Her children have adopted what Goodall (2005) defines as the “tragic” perspective on their narrative inheritance. The reason for this, I argue, is because the unfortunate narrative of orphanhood is the most powerful and the only discourse available. However, Joanna also unexpectedly describes how she is comfortable with other people outside of her family inheriting her life (hi)story: But funny I’ve spoke to people outside of the family more so. And I would talk, I talk more to them, people yeah and it’s always a group of women like there’s, it’s only a group of women like that will, some of them maybe have problems with drugs and things like that, have bad living in their families like had, been abused and things like that there like and it isn’t and I would talk, I would tell them un’s more like. I’ve told them un’s more than I have told my family. Why is she able to disclose her secret narrative to these women? Is it because she has an identity within her family, which she does not wish to spoil? She wants her children to identify her as mother and her husband to see her as wife rather than to give her the status of a charity case that we usually apply to the orphan.

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In order to protect her identity within the “system” or “miniculture” (Goodall 2005) of her family, Joanna’s strategy has been to maintain silence about certain truths of the “self who was” and therefore the “self who is” (Barthes 1975). However, memories, even those that are absent, have ways of revealing themselves and for Joanna this has been to share her story with strangers in this group. But these are not just any strangers, they are women who have similar traumatic experiences in their past and who themselves carry absent memories.23

C ONCLUSION It is clear now that we construct narratives from our memories (Yow 2005: 35).

As Yow and others argue, “[o]ur narratives are our memories” (Plummer 2001: 235). Therefore, memories are important for biographical construction and sense of self. The argument is that we form our identities not only genetically but also narratively (Goodall 2005). What has been problematised for this article is whether the orphan “identity is necessarily defined by absence, that it has to be an empty category, something imaginary” (Raczymow 1994: 99). In order to ponder such a dilemma it was important to consider the “orphan text” (Peters 2000), the legitimised discourse within which the idea of orphanhood circulates. At the beginning, I outlined how the embodiment of orphanhood was displayed as the “illiterate, impoverished, neglected” child, which has been the discursive signifier since the Victorian period (Peters 2000: 141) and the sexually abused victim of the Catholic Church within Ireland. Some of the participants are caught within a contradictory situation in that they expressed their wish not to be known by such identification, yet because of its hegemonic status, it was the only category with which the participants could (re)construct themselves and their narratives, and the only discourse within which they could position their selves. For the orphan, inheriting nothingness has led not only to absent memories remaining within their biographies, but also that, for some orphans, they discover that their being is the absent memory of their family. The shame and embarrassment the orphan feels because of their familial and society’s understanding of their identity becomes transmitted through secrecy along generations and the

23 This resonates with Fines’ (1988) discussion about the experiential gap between the Holocaust and post-Holocaust generations. She argues that part of the problem lies in the fact that the children or grandchildren did not “experience” the event and this creates the gap between generations.

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only legacy of orphanhood that remains in a family is one of absence. The lack of narrative inheritance for both the orphan and post-orphan generation means that for different reasons they draw on public discourse to either align their story with or to create a biography of their mother. The biographical void widens with each generation. I cannot decipher whether or not the orphans who participated in my study are aware that they are inflicting the same sense of loss and absence they felt with regards to their family inheritance onto their children by keeping their biographies hidden, and it is not my place to do so. But my hope is that the life (hi)stories of my participants collected for this project will help in some way to realign peripheral experience and autobiography with that of collective, cultural remembering(s); ensuring that characters such as “Oliver” do not continue to dominate the biography of the orphan. The greatest consequence of familial remembering(s) is that inherited life stories can be powerful driving forces to help understand the construction of self (Personal Narratives Group 1989). It is imperative to recognise and embrace familial memories alongside society’s grand narratives; if we fail to do so our selves could be lost forever amongst cultural identity practices.

R EFERENCES Atkinson, Robert (1998): The Life Story Interview. Qualitative Research Methods Series, Vol. 44. London: Sage. Barthes, Roland (1975): An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative. New Literary History 6(2): 237-272. Brockmeier, Jens (2002): Remembering and Forgetting: Narrative as Cultural Memory. Culture and Psychology 8(1): 15-43. Davies, Bronwyn & Rom Harré (1990): Positioning: The Discursive production of selves. http://www.macmannberg.se/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/DavidsHarré-Positioning-Theory1.pdf (Retrieved 27 May 2011) Dickens, Charles (1994): Oliver Twist. London: Penguin. Ferguson, Harry (2007): Abused and Looked After Children as ‘Moral Dirt’. Child Abuse and Institutional Care in Historical Perspective. Journal of Social Policy 36(1): 123-139. Fine, Ellen (1988): The Absent Memory. The Act of Writing in Post-Holocaust French Literature. In: Lang, Berel (Ed.): Writing and the Holocaust. New York: Holmes & Meier; pp. 41-57.

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Foucault, Michel (1980): Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. London: Harvester Press. – (1972): The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon. Goffman, Erving (1963): Stigma. Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood-Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Goodall, Harold Lloyd (2005): Narrative Inheritance. A Nuclear Family with Toxic Secrets. Qualitative Inquiry 11(4): 492-513. McNay, Margaret (2009): Absent Memory, Family Secrets, Narrative Inheritance. Qualitative Inquiry 15(7): 1178-1188. Mead, George Herbert (1967): Mind, Self and Society. From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviourist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, Robert Lee (2005): Editor’s introduction. The Ambit of Biographical Research. In: Miller, Robert Lee (Ed.): Biographical Research Methods: Volume I. London: Sage. Murphy, John (2010): Memory, Identity and Public Narrative. Composing a Life-Story after Leaving Institutional Care, Victoria, 1945-83. Cultural and Social History 7 (3): 297-314. Personal Narratives Group (Ed.) (1989): Interpreting Women’s Lives. Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Peters, Laura (2000): Orphan Texts. Victorian Orphans, Culture and Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Plummer, Ken (2001): Documents of Life. An Invitation to a Critical Humanism. London: Sage. Portelli, Alessandro (1998): What Makes Oral History Different. In: Perks, R. & A. Thomson (Eds.): The Oral History Reader. London: Routledge; pp. 63-74. Raczymow, Henri (1994): Memory Shot through with Holes, trans. Alan Astro. Yale French Studies (special issue, “Discourses of Jewish Identity in Twentieth-Century France”) 85: 98-105. Raftery, Mary & Eoin O’Sullivan (1999): Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools. Dublin: New Island Books. Smith, Mark (2008): Historical Abuse in Residential Childcare. An Alternative View. Practice 20(1): 29-41. Yow, Valerie (2005): Recording Oral History. A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Walnut Creek: AltaMira

Public Discourse and Private Memory Processes in Luxembourgian Steel Worker Families D ENIS S CUTO

In Luxembourg in 2009, the Chemins de fer luxembourgeois planned a full year of celebration to honour 150 years of railways (1859-2009). To complete the celebrations, on October 17, 2009, the Luxembourgish-language television station RTL devoted an episode of the weekly science show Pisa to the history of the Luxembourgian railway. I was invited as an historian to give an interview about it. I was astounded by a (suggestive) question that was asked by the journalist. He asked: Don’t you think that since the railways allowed industry workers to remain living in their village instead of having to move to the industrial district, that it was an important contribution to social peace and to a culture of consensus, and in so doing, led to the absence of large social conflicts, as in, for example, strikes? This question, or rather, statement, obscures the actual historical development: at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, there was a rural exodus and urbanisation of the industrial south, and only a fraction of the people could remain living in their villages thanks to the railway. There were recurrent, larger social conflicts throughout the 20th century (1921, 1936, 1949, 1953, 1955, 1973) that also took the form of larger strikes (Scuto 1999). As an historian of the worker movement, I was forced to conclude during this interview that thirty years after the last general strike in the history of the country – it occurred

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on April 5, 1982 – this chapter of the social history is no longer a reference for the media, or is simply ignored. This is symbolic of a post-industrial view of history, according to which the situation in Luxembourg transformed, without any transition, from a time in which the farmer majority is described as being the most important bearer of a community-founding tradition, into a situation in which Luxembourg was considered a rich post-industrial financial centre and a European capital, in a process which Marc Ferro appropriately alluded to as a “histoire sans histoires” (Ferro 1992). At the same time, the interview is exemplary of a public discourse which demonstrates how rapid and fundamental the structural change is in Luxembourgian society. Let us take a closer look at this structural change with regard to industrial workers. Industrial workers are affected to a particular extent by the general social processes of change, in that they experience the loss of their economic and social livelihood, and, therefore, the resulting damage to their identity. In Luxembourg, the decline of the industrial working class began in the mid-1960s with the “service revolution”. While the number of people employed in the industrial sector decreased from 44% in 1960 to 23% in 2001, the number of people employed in the service industry rose from 40.9% to 76% during the same time period. The economic centre of the country shifted from the industrial south to the capital city Luxembourg; this development was further fostered by the heavy industry crisis in the 1970s. In many respects therefore, the last decades constitute a history of loss for the working class: loss of work, loss of forms of sociability and cooperation, loss of societal importance. That is one side of the coin. Luxembourg’s booming transformation into a financial centre and a centre of European institutions, which started at the end of the 1960s, also offered an alternative to the decline of the steel industry and has brought renewed, strong economic growth with continuously increasing demand for workers in the service sector since the 1980s. Many children from Luxembourgian worker families were able to find secure employment both in the financial community as well as in the expanding public sector (state, local government, electricity, postal services, railway). There was a fifty percent increase in wages in the financial sector from 1984 to 2000, while the wages in the public sector show an even greater growth rate (Statec 2003:159 et seq., Fehlen 2009). Moreover, the consequences of the crisis within the steel industry could be cushioned socially because the government, labour unions and the population became mobilised (‘anti-crisis division’, early retirement schemes, occupational

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retraining). There were no redundancies, although the largest company ARBED (now ArcelorMittal) has shrunk from having 25,000 personnel in 1974 to 5,000 today. Various factories still exist (Belval, Esch-Schifflingen, Differdingen, Rodingen). For this reason, the industrial region, in contrast to in Lorraine or in the Ruhr, is not identified here with a hopeless crisis situation or solely with job losses and emigration.

T HE G OVERNMENT AND L ABOUR U NIONS ’ P UBLIC D ISCOURSES AND W ORKERS ’ C OLLECTIVE M EMORY On the one hand, the national rescue of the Luxembourg steel cooperation Arbed has been in the foreground of the public political discourse up until now. Arbed experienced two mergers in the last decade and is now known as ArcelorMittal; it is one of the steel sector’s global players on the international market. On the other hand, as already mentioned, politicians repeatedly point out that the country’s prosperity in the 20th century is due to the importance of the steel industry as an economic sector and of steelwork as a form of employment (for example, when they state their opinions concerning the necessary reconversion of the industrial south). For this reason, the memory of this work sector must be maintained without fail. The valorisation and conversion of a blast furnace area in an industrial brownfield in Belval is at the heart of a large-scale political-economic project that is meant to grant economic revival to the entire South and decentralise the national economy. During his speech at the closing of the last blast furnace in Belval in July 1997, Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker emphasised the national importance of remembering the steel workers: I remember that when I was a child, the Luxembourgian flag flew at the top of the six blast furnaces whenever there was a national holiday. And that was the sign that what happens here had an awful lot to do with what happens all over. And that, in a way, this smelt mill and the land were not only related to one another, but had grown into each other, and remain conjoined. (…) Those who left their lives here are still remembered, in their streets, in their village, in many places; those who left a lot of their lives, many of whom left their health here without anyone asking them. And that all, that stays and leaves deep traces, and it leaves behind a landscape that we must honour. That is why these traces of what made our country great and of what carried its name out into the world cannot disappear from the Minettebecken landscape, from the skyline and from the horizon of the place that we call home (Maroldt 1997).

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While it is the sacrifices that the workers had to make within the scope of their careers in order to enable the country’s industrial boom which are brought to the forefront by the government, the labour union’s culture of remembrance emphasises the importance of the labour disputes in this context. Alongside the official government remembrance, official remembrance of the working class was established during the postwar period, promoted by actors who were unionists, politicians and historians (LAV 1966; OGB-L 1986). However, since the 1980s and the relative decline in industrial labour forces, this “official remembrance of the labour movement” has been increasingly stepped back. The last historical celebration was in 1991 for the country’s largest union: OGB-L (Onofhängege Gewerkschaftsbond Lëztebuerg), LAV’s successor (Lëtzebuerger Arbechter Verband). Since 2006, this labour union has also abstained from participating in the traditional worker demonstration on May 1st; it was replaced by a “festival of work, cultures and dialogue” in the Neumünster Abbey’s cultural centre, where a multicultural message focusing on unifying the peoples is at the forefront. Moreover, the steelworkers, in contrast to the miners, had no actual locations made available for collective remembrance until a decision was made in 2000 to conserve two blast furnaces at Belval as industry memorials. Numerically, the mineurs represent a smaller group within the industrial labour forces: in 1938, there were 4,000 miners compared to 16,000 steelworkers, in 1960, 2,000 compared to 22,000. Nevertheless, their culture of memory and celebration has a much larger presence. Every year on December 4th, the miners celebrate the Feast Day of St. Barbara to honour their patron saint. In 1973, before the closing of the last mine in 1981, a national museum was opened up in Rümelingen. A national miner memorial had already been erected in Kayl in 1957: twenty-four stone memorial plaques with the names of 1,452 miners who were fatally injured. Many industrial areas have hero memorials for the miners. Up until now, the remembrance of the steelworkers was kept alive primarily by associations of former workers from specific factories. Likewise, communities remember the work by erecting this or that large production tool as a monument. It was only recently, in 2008, that a St. Eligius Feast Day was inaugurated by the Amicale des Hauts Fourneaux A et B de Belval in order to honour the metal workers patron saint. In contrast, remembrance of the workers’ struggles is increasingly fading from the collective memory. One explanation for this is that not only does the shrinkage of the labour force accompany the decline of the steel industry as a result of its structural crisis, but it also accompanies continuous social advancement. This initially manifested itself in the form of a doubling of the real income

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of the workers (from 1956-1980) and in the last three decades, in a process characteristic of Luxembourg, that one can describe as becoming officials, i.e. employed by the state or by a bank.

O RAL H ISTORY AND C OLLECTIVE M EMORY W ORKING C LASS C OMMUNITIES

IN

Since the 1970s, oral history research has been dealing with questions regarding collective memory in working class communities. Daniel Bertaux and Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame thus distinguish between a “collective memory of the workers’ movement” and a “collective workers memory” (Bertaux & Bertaux-Wiame 1980). As they point out, if inspected more closely, the first form of memory is limited rather to the history of the labour unions and their leading personalities, to the political level of the workers’ movement (Bertaux & Bertaux-Wiame 1980). It follows the labour disputes’ linear timeline. They contrast this memory with the “collective workers memory”. This form of collective memory deals with what Bertraux and Bertaux-Wiame call “genuine worker culture”, a culture that is based on the small social spaces of work, family and neighbourhood life. This memory follows the cyclical rhythm of everyday life. In their oral history research on pensioners from the metal industry in Givors, Yves Lequin and Jean Métral take on this difference and make it more nuanced by speaking of “mémoires individuelles s’inscrivant dans une mémoire commune”: “individual memories” which deal with the everyday, which overlap one another and add to a “communal memory”, a memory which is particularly focussed on one’s daily relation to the working environment, experiences from childhood and adolescence that are linked to the former, the apprenticeship period, the figure of the “good worker” and the labour disputes. The labour disputes however, as elements of the “collective memory of the workers’ movement” (in France the Front populaire, the Résistance, the reconstruction after the liberation), are not only remembered individually, but are also remembered through encounters, events and through references to actors who have taken on the function of memory bearers (Lequin & Métral 1980). The following section will use the example of two steel worker families to illustrate the complex interplay between industrial areas in decline on the one hand, and economic growth and even a spirit of optimism on the other. This section will discuss the question regarding the differences and similarities between the government’s public discourse, the collective memory of the workers’

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movement and the private memory, as well as the general problem of processing social change in familial communication. In the scope of this article, two worker families will be introduced which have experienced the social change differently. This difference in experience has a large influence on the form and content of the family memory in general and especially on the assessment of social changes over the last decades. In the first family, the 70 year-old grandfather worked his way up from electrician to ingénieur technicien at the Belval Steelworks, while his stepson received further education and successfully transitioned from steelwork to working at a bank. After secondary school, the daughter initially worked as a nurse and then also obtained a job as a bank employee. The granddaughter’s future is still uncertain, as she is currently finishing an apprenticeship with limited career prospects. In the second family, the 84 year-old grandfather gave up his position as a journeyman baker after the war in favour of a craftsman position in the steel business. He worked at Terre Rouge until 1968 and then at Belval until 1981. The grandmother had 4 years of Gymnasium (grammar school) and then completed a 2-year course to become a nursery school teacher, a profession that she practised for 28 years. The second generation, both daughter and son, took up the occupation of primary school teacher after attending the Gymnasium and college. The third generation continues the family’s history of higher education. Both families have thus profited to differing extents from social advances after the war during the cinquante glorieuses, a period specific to Luxembourg.

D ECLINE AND O PTIMISM : AMBIVALENCE BETWEEN P UBLIC D ISCOURSE AND P RIVATE M EMORY P ROCESSES The first family illustrates the ambivalence between an industrial region in decline on the one hand, and economic growth and even a spirit of optimism on the other. For the individual family members, this social change is not to be equated with loss, but rather with advancement, in part. This becomes clear in the son’s story, among others. His story comes up in the individual interviews with the 70 year-old grandfather (Norbert Schmit), his 75 year-old wife (Marie-Antoinette Schmit) and the 48 year-old daughter (Margret Petry), as well as during the family discussion. The grandfather talks about how his own father had advised him in the fifties to work at the steel company ARBED instead of at AEG or Siemens because jobs were more secure there. His own son initially took the same path in the seventies and worked as an electrician at ARBED Belval. During the steel crisis in the seventies however, he was afraid of being transferred to

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one of the steel company’s other factories, and so he switched to a job at a bank in the capital. As stated, there were no layoffs in the steel industry; there were however transfers from factory to factory. The loss of employment security in the steel industry thus becomes a career opportunity in this case, although the grandfather and the daughter emphasise different aspects of the story in their narratives. Interestingly, the grandfather alludes to the many further education courses that the son had to attend at the steel company as being the decisive criteria for success in his later application to the bank. The daughter evaluates her brother’s career differently, in that she stresses that he attained “eng besser”, a better position at the bank because he could already go into early retirement there at 50 years old. While the grandfather talks about employment security, the value of work in and of itself and of education as the foundation of work and success, his daughter is thinking about the departure from the steelwork world made possible by rising social benefits. Moreover, the differences between the public discourse and private memory become clear here. Crisis-ridden processes, which are either not mentioned or are reframed in the public discourse, find their way into the family memory. The psychological consequences of the closing of individual factories and transfers from factory to factory or of being assigned to public relief works in the socalled anti-crisis division were thematised by the first and second generation. During the family discussion, the daughter refers therefore to the global economic crisis in the seventies – a crisis which was simultaneously a steel crisis. There was even a word for it in the vernacular: Krisis. Workers whose positions were eliminated because their factory had to close, now had to help with forestry work or with the construction of the Autobahns. The grandfather gave an example of a 57 year-old worker who was suddenly deployed as a technician for the construction of a blast furnace and was barely able to manage it. Or he gives examples of other workers who believed in the survival of their steelwork up until the end, in spite of information to the contrary. In this interview, the “grand narrative” of the Luxembourg steel industry’s more than 100 year-long success story – first as the motor of national economic growth, then as an example of the socially acceptable, regulated reconversion in the wake of the structural crisis – is relativized to a large extent. Generations of Luxembourgian children were confronted with this success story as early as primary school. For instance, they were taught the many inventions which were supposed to explain the success and importance of the steel industry for Luxembourg (application of the Thomas Method from 1886 on, and Thomas meal as a fertilizer for use in agriculture, application of Henry Grey’s rolling process from 1900 on, Paul Wurth blast furnace construction in the 20th and 21st century).

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While speaking about the further education he pursued in Longwy in the French-speaking Lorraine, the grandfather claims that over a long period of time it was not continuous innovation which characterised the steel company Arbed, but rather their conservative wait-and-see tactic: Norbert Schmit (grandfather): Oh, that was when the [Furnace] A was in operation. Yes. Yes, yes, a whole year in Longwy. Yes, it always worked out well for Arbed, it didn’t need much. As with the A that we started up, uh, the general management didn’t switch over to the newest technology at all. It had, it w/, it was its, it was already capable of having better technology, for example. Denis Scuto (interviewer): Hmm, Hmm. N.S.: No, No, it wanted, was cautious, you know. D.S.: Hmm. N.S.: Oh, why do we need such high pressure in the furnace, it works with less pressure too. The others already worked with high-pressure, then the uh, the operation of the furnace is smoother. D.S.: Hmm, Hmm. N.S.: If you. No, no, Arbed still worked with low blast pressure, oh, it’s fine, it’s fine. It was always conservative, those who were in the, in the management. It was only in 1970, that we put the B, the really modern furnace, into operation and this one worked with high pressure, with 2 bars. [clears his throat] The A worked with half a bar, you know. Cautious, and in 1970 then, however, the technology is then, the most modern was introduced, that existed. In this criticism of the management’s conservative attitude, there is an implicit assumption of the individual’s self-valorisation as a “good worker” who has developed competencies through his continuous handling of the machines and through his contribution to the shaping and improvement of the work process that make him capable of knowing best, even of knowing better than his superiors. As Luisa Passerini has pointed out, the figure of the “good worker” or the “skilled worker ideology” (Passerini 1980), both as a source of autonomy and of assimilation, is ambivalent. This worker, who cares about his work, who conducts that work diligently and improves it technically, who is proud of the product’s quality and who simultaneously observes his familial responsibilities – a figure who is present in both family discussions, although unequally weighted – alludes to both the requirement of self-regulation at the workplace and to the identification with the company, the employers and engineers who limit the skilled workers decision-making authority.

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There are however also several similarities between the public discourse and private memory alongside the differences. The trente glorieuses period (19451975), before the steel crisis, comes up in the first family’s family discussions as a golden era in which one “earned a decent wage” and had “a secure position” (grandfather), in strong contrast to the period of world economic crisis and to the current situation of globalisation today (and ArcelorMittal’s acquisition of Arbed) in which one “is always afraid”: Norbert Schmit (grandfather): Oh yeah. I think, that the, the role, it isn’t, the roll that, that, that, that the steel mill had, not, we did go to work there. Sure, it was dangerous, but you have Margret Petry (daughter): At that time, people earned more N.S.: earned a decent wage, M.P.: Yes. N.S.: you had a secure position. Denis Scuto (interviewer): Hmm. N.S.: You weren’t always afraid M.P.: Yes. N.S.: Like today, you don’t know, you don’t know, uh, is our warehouse going to exist in two years. Here you knew, that you can go on pension. M.P.: Yesterday they said that Arbed is still, or that Arcelor is still one of the companies with the most, uh, employees, so Marie-Antoinette Schmit (grandmother): who have to work M.P.: who work, right Positive social measures as in low rent for company-owned apartments are highlighted and aspects like environmental pollution and particle emissions which are hazardous to health are accepted or trivialised due to such social measures, as the following excerpt from the family discussion will demonstrate: Norbert Schmit (grandfather): how we practically lived for free in the company housing. And you have to, right. We had practically, in the housing you had cheap, what did you pay, not much, you know. Denis Scuto (interviewer): Hmm N.S.: and you got electricity for cheaper. D.S.: Yes, yes. N.S.: You got them restored for free, the housing, but afterwards they also, at the end they didn’t do much anymore. You were, uh … Oh, it was also dirty, here you could, here you could, while the agglomeration was still in operation, every morning here you could, uh Margret Petry (daughter): Oh yes. Yes, yes. N.S.: you could sweep away red dust every morning, right.

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Marie-Antoinette Schmit (grandmother): Yes. Yes, yes. N.S.: When the agglo/agglomeration was still in operation, D.S.: Hmm. N.S.: In spite of the filter systems, well yeah, they didn’t always work. [clears his throat] But you could, when you swept here, you had red dust on the M.A.S.: Yes, yes. In many ways, these insights are confirmed by the interviews with the second steel worker family. As is the case with the grandfather in the first family, the second family’s grandfather shows great interest in the work processes at his workplace; in the first case it is about blast furnaces and in the second, agglomeration. He had carefully retained all of his yearly pay slips from 1956 to 1981 and gave them to the interviewer. One feels how both men identify greatly with the Arbed company as a Luxembourgian company from the golden era of the post-war period up until the steel crisis. In both families, the grandfather figure – as the “good worker” who performed his job diligently without boasting about it – plays an important role. For both grandfathers however, the image that comes to the fore is of a slow-paced, quasi state-owned enterprise, and not that of an innovative, modern company. Moreover, the grandfather in the second family was a small shareholder in the Arbed company. In contrast to the grandfather in the first family – who was active in the union and a sympathiser of the communist party of which the working committee’s president in his steel mill was a member – the second family’s grandfather sees himself as a Die Zeit reader, an admirer of Helmut Schmidt and a supporter of moderate, social democratic positions; he does not emphasise the importance of the labour disputes. On the contrary, one reason why he gave up his baking apprenticeship in favour of a tradesman position was the social peace in the company, alongside the regulated work and income conditions. There were no strikes in Luxembourg, whereas the future of steelworks in Lorraine would be destroyed by strike movements. In the one-on-one interview, he highlights the “wonderful atmosphere” that prevailed in the agglomeration business at Terre Rouge in the 1960s, when people were still eng Equip (a team) and the workers did exactly what the engineer instructed them to do. This emphasis on social peace at work – something which is specific to Luxembourg – is mentioned in the grandfather’s narration in direct opposition to the subsequent time period, when many Lorrainian workers were transferred to Luxembourgian steelworks due to the closing of their factories at the end of the 1960s and in the 1970s. They are described as “different”; there was “a real lack” of atmosphere back then.

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The grandfather relates this time period, “when the French arrived”, directly to the processes of transformation initiated by globalisation over the last decade. The family’s first and second generations see these changes as negative. During the family discussions, the acquisition of the company Arcelor – which was already a merger of Arbed and French and Spanish steel companies – by the Indian steel giant Mittal, becomes a symbol of this development: Jean Schütz (grandfather): Yes, yes. By and large, there’s not much to it anymore, you know. That is, today, you can have a, a, a position, a, have a job, that is well-paid, which, uh, where you get a lot done, and then somewhere, then some Mittal comes, and it comes from India, and says, now I’m going to buy up Arbed. That is, uh, that is, is not so nice anymore. Barbara Schütz (grandmother): Oh well J. Sch.: And if Mittal were to come now and say, I’m shutting down in Luxembourg now, what would Juncker say then? Nothing ... nothing. B. Sch.: No, he wouldn’t have anything to say, most likely. Denis Scuto (interviewer): Hmm J. Sch.: Nothing. J. Sch.: Yes, he honestly never thought about that, that something like that would happen. You always thought, it would continue in the same way, you know. You didn’t think, that it, uh, would change like that, right. Jean-Pierre Schütz (son): Yes, especially since, since the government now, well, let’s say, that the, uh, Arbed, that was, like, it was like, uh, it was just a Luxembourgian company. The grandfather says that he is happy that he does not work in today’s world because in contrast to earlier times, one cannot secure a lifetime post in private industry, and not even at a bank. The government is the only secure employer left. The son, who is a teacher and state official, also emphasises the government’s important role in the rescuing of the Arbed company and fears an end to the government’s decisive influence during a time of globalisation. The son and father both agree. There is a harmonious familial communication in the second family, the grandmother and the son strive to confirm and complete the grandfather’s memories. Even the granddaughter chips in with an anecdote during the family discussion, and recounts how the grandfather used to teach her how to differentiate between ore-bearing and non-ore-bearing rocks during their walks through the former surface mining area. There is only one topic that initiates a conflict. The steel industry’s role and image in relation to environmental pollution are seen differently by the grandfather on the one hand, and the grandmother and their son, the teacher, on the

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other. While the son honours the Arbed company’s role as representing the interests of the state, monitors the globalisation process with utmost concern and remembers following the development of the steel giant since he was in secondary school, he repeatedly highlights the high environmental cost engendered by steel production as well as its health risks. He is supported by his mother in this matter, while his father disputes the existence of pollution. The family’s house was located close to the steelworks and the grandmother tells a story about how her son was already endangered by the industry emissions as an infant: Barbara Schütz (grandmother): I also told him [the interviewer, D.S.] about the first time that I went out with the pushchair, when you got dust there on your nose. Nadine Schütz (granddaughter): We heard that earlier. B. Sch.: [laughs] As F. stood next to us, I said, look at the dust he has on his nose. [laughs] Jean-Pierre Schütz (son): [laughs] Yes, it was indeed extre/ it was also in the tramway street, it was really extreme there B. Sch.: Extreme dust J.P. Sch.: That sure was incredible. B. Sch.: That was extreme dust, yes. Denis Scuto (interviewer): Hmm, yes. J.P. Sch.: It was so close to the steel mill, you know. B. Sch.: Yes, I was happy, after we had got away from there, you know. Jean Schütz (grandfather): Just something that was, this, uh, dust, it was burnt, and it was, uh, not aggressive for the lungs. The grandfather reinforces that there were health problems in the iron mines that were caused by particulate emissions (silicosis), and not in the steelworks. Even when asked about the new electric steel plant’s environmental pollution caused by dioxin, or the issue of heavy metals leaking into the ground, the son and father get into a conflict. After a long back and forth in which he attempts to convince his father with scientific arguments, the son advises the interviewer to change the subject.

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These family discussions show quite clearly that there is no grand narrative that is central to the family memory, but rather individual stories which each person can reference. This section will provide a detailed examination of the first family. The interpretation of the grandfather’s experiences and the complex and rapid transformation over the last decades on an individual basis within the scope of the family proves to be the primary concern of the participants in the family discussion, although one must qualify this by stressing that, for the 18 year-old granddaughter, the “steelwork” frame of reference either plays no role at all any longer or hasn’t played a role yet, based on her life experience to date. It is the daughter who repeatedly uses the grandfather’s stories to tell her own story during this family discussion. For example, when they were discussing the grandfather many extra shifts on Sundays and holidays: Norbert Schmit (grandfather): Yes, there were extraordinary repairs needed here. Yes, ri/. So then at night you had to, someone had to be in charge there. But you didn’t get a Christmas at all, you know. Margret Petry (daughter): No. And you were always someone who liked Christmas. N.S.: Yes, yes. M.P.: My father is a real family guy, you know. Denis Scuto (interviewer): Hmm. M.P.: Yes, then there was, then there was some serious nagging. Marie-Antoinette Schmit (grandmother): [laughs] M.P.: Yeah, for sure. Then we already started getting sad when you went to the door, oh no, father is working on Sunday, again. Oh no. M.A.S.: [laughs] M.P.: [laughs] The grandfather, as the “good worker”, often had to demonstrate particular dedication to the factory, but that is only ostensibly seen by the daughter as something positive, in reality, she reproaches him for having spoiled the whole family’s mood by doing so. All in all, what is shown during the family discussions is how it is a challenge for the 2nd and 3rd generations to integrate their own life history into the family’s history, which is presented by the parental generation as a time in which one worked hard in order to achieve a better future, and as a struggle for a better

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standard of living – from living in company housing to the construction of their own home – thanks to the steel industry work. The conflict surrounding integration into the family’s history of advancement, is an important topic for the first family. For the grandparent generation, their life history is in keeping with the general socio-economic developments: advancement, continuous growth of prosperity and social security. This individual and collective development based on effort and, as the individual histories and in particular the history of building one’s own home clearly show, on frugality and austerity. In this context, the daughter repeatedly contests the grandfather’s narrative authority. For instance, the grandfather recounts how the family didn’t possess a radio during, or even after, the war. In order to tell her own story, the daughter then promptly remembers that there was also no money when her parents built their house at the beginning of the 70s, and that she received a pair of roller skates as a child and couldn’t believe her luck because gifts were generally impossible. Margret Petry (daughter): Yes, I’m saying, now that you mention it [unintelligible] Back then we were building here, so there wasn’t any more money then either. Norbert Schmit (grandfather): That was, yes, yes, yes. M.P.: And I can remember, once we went to Be/ to Esch to the summer clearance sale, then I thought, when I got the roller sk/, I got a pair of roller skates, I thought N.S.: Yes. Yes. Denis Scuto (interviewer): Hmm, hmm. M.P.: I was on cloud nine. So, that was, that Marie-Antoinette Schmit (grandmother): Yes M.P.: was the best present that I’ve ever gotten. N.S.: Yes. M.A.S.: A pair of roller skates. M.P.: A pair of roller skates, right. And that’s that must have been in ‘71. The grandfather actually wanted to finish his narration about the radio that they didn’t have during or after the war, but the daughter interrupts him to tell her story as a comparison and to make it clear that even 30 years after the war, consumer desires were not fulfilled as a matter of course. The grandfather begins to speak again to emphasise that the roller skates story underscores the fact that, for steelworkers with large families, the acquisition of one’s own home was accompanied with enormous financial burden and self-imposed material frugality. The grandmother would like to moderate between the two positions and points out

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that the times were hard in general back then, but she is also interrupted by the daughter: Marie-Antoinette Schmit (grandmother): Yes, today it’s easier, you know. Margret Petry (daughter): Everything’s a matter of course today. M.A.S.: [laughs] Yes. M.P.: It’s just there. But aren’t we going back to that time again? M.A.S.: Yes. M.P.: Aren’t we coming back there again? The more I M.A.S.: Yes. M.P.: see a catastrophe, what’s coming at us. Denis Scuto (interviewer): Hmm. M.P.: Already for our children. I see it with my daughter now, she wants an apprenticeship. You practically have to beg someone on your knees to find someone to hire her. The daughter thus relativizes the austerity that shaped her parents’ childhood and youth by pointing out what she herself has had to give up. By doing so, she is laying claim to part of the familial achievement of advancement, which, above all else, is manifested in the arduous construction of a house. At the same time, she belittles the parents’ accomplishments, especially those of her father, by emphasising that they were made at the children’s expense to some extent. The daughter confirms her parents’ memories only in the passage in which they portray their time as a “golden era” of job security and of a “decent wage” (see section 2). Otherwise, two competing narratives circle around one another, trying to win both their place in the family memory and interpretive dominance: one describing today’s “struggle” about work and better standards of living and the other that of times gone by. The daughter highlights the lack of career opportunities for young people today using the example of the granddaughter – who agrees with her – and by doing so, once again relativizes the parents’ distressful or hard times. She counters her parents’ story of a life of advancement with the frustration of her belief in advancement, with her disappointed notion that it would continue to get better. Furthermore, the daughter stresses that today, the purchasing of one’s own home is also associated with an enormous amount of financial sacrifice and, in contrast to in the past, it is something which would be unthinkable if women did not have gainful employment. For her part, the grandmother points out that girls didn’t have the opportunity “to go to school” in the past as opposed to today. The dialogue and interaction finally induce the grandmother to go from her ini-

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tial statement of “everything is easier today” to the conclusion that “it wasn’t so easy back then either”. At the same time, the fact that the topic of house construction takes on such an important position in the family discussion underscores that in family memory – in contrast to in the “collective memory of the labour movement” – what is focussed upon is more the relative prosperity of the working classes, in other words, the result of social redistribution, than the causes of this redistribution, the labour disputes or the collective bargaining. The grandfather’s stories, which refer to the union struggle around payment for overtime and shifts on Sunday, are only commented upon by the wife and the daughter in regards to how they negatively affected family life or to how they were linked the other members of the family having to work (e.g. putting stamps on union newsletters). There is a consensus however when the grandfather criticises that there are only a few union members who still take part in the May 1st celebrations; this demonstrates that an awareness of the importance of commitment to the union still exists.

C ONCLUSION The “communicative practice of remembering together through storytelling” (Angela Keppler) creates a complex family memory in which, for the first family, one can observe competition for a legitimation of the narrative on the one hand (in other words, the question of which generation had the most interesting or most difficult experiences), but in which, on the other hand, it is still possible to reach a negotiated agreement (Keppler 1994). In this case, the agreement can be summed up in the formula: “nothing was/is easy”. The interviews with the second steelworker family present clear differences in comparison to the first family concerning family communication and memory. In the second family’s accounts, there are almost no noticeable tensions or competing narratives in connection to social change. These differences are closely linked to the socio-structural conditions of experience and transmission of the processes of change. Adhering to Bertaux’ typologies, the two families are characterised by different trajectoires sociales familiales and microclimats culturels (cf. Bertaux, 1991: 8). In the case of both families, the grandfather’s education ended with the journeyman’s examination (tradesman apprenticeship). The differences become visible when it comes to their marriages. Grandfather Schmit from the first family marries a woman who follows the female equivalent of his educational and career path: after housekeeping school she started working as a

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server in a restaurant. Grandfather Schütz marries a women with a 4-year Gymnasium degree and a diploma as a nursery school teacher, a career which she practices continuously, aside from a 15-year-long “break for children”. Moreover, the second family is already in possession of their own home at the time of marriage, while the first family initially lives in rented factory housing and is only able to build their own house after a period of ten years. The education of the offspring in the first family has remained at the level of the earlier Handwerkerschule (trade school) and today’s Realschule or lycées technique (vocationally oriented secondary school), while the children and grandchildren in the second family go to the Gymnasium. Further education and professional retraining have accompanied the first family’s social advancement, but occupational uncertainty is the reality for some of the grandchildren. In contrast, the children in the second family’s professional advancement has been marked by university studies and government careers. The structural conditions revealed by these differing trajectories may be an explanation for the fact that in the first family, communal stories are told that deal above all with the private development of the family (house construction along with the experienced difficulties, austerity, private worries about the future as a result of the general changes over the last years, importance of union involvement). They also provide a possible explanation for the competitive relationship between father and daughter. Since the focus is placed precisely upon the personal worries and battles about today’s social advancement and that of earlier times, conflicts in this area become apparent. Against the background of social change, memory processes take a different course in the second family, in which the family was more independent due to owning their own home and having a double income, and in which the children are relatively free of worry about their futures. It is possible that the fact that the second family’s grandfather is older (born 1925) plays a role in the narration of an unspectacular, harmonious life between family and work (and without going to a pub), a narrative which is confirmed by the other family members. It is significant to note that differences as well as focuses specific to gender and generations only emerge when the family discusses basic social developments, as in environmental pollution for example. In other words: the future of the second family’s members appears to be so secure that one can allow oneself the “luxury” of fighting over general social topics. On the whole, the analysis of these family discussions shows that, on the one hand, no grand narrative takes centre stage, but rather individual stories which can be referenced by each person. On the other hand, it is precisely this communicative practice that invests the stories with an identity-forming function, and

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not for the family as a whole, but for the individual family members who are trying to find a common theme for their lives in a complex and quickly changing society. In the end and in their own way, the family discussions we conducted confirm the specificity of a worker memory compared to the labour movement memory, as highlighted by Bertaux-Wiame and Lequin & Métral. In the worker memory, the actual working conditions and experiences as well as their processing, and the small social spaces of the “labour force”, the family, and the neighbourhood are at the fore. The mémoire du mouvement ouvrier is read and interpreted from the perspective of these spaces.

R EFERENCES Bertaux, Daniel & Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame (1991): “Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern [...]” Transmissionen und soziale Mobilität über fünf Generationen. BIOS. Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung und Oral History 4(1): 13-40. – (1988): Le patrimoine et sa lignée: transmission et mobilité sociale sur cinq générations. Life Stories / Récits de vie 4: 8-25. – (1980): Autobiographische Erinnerungen und kollektives Gedächtnis. In: Niethammer, Lutz (Hg.): Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis. Die Praxis der “Oral History”. Frankfurt/M.: Syndikat; pp. 108-122. Fehlen, Fernand (2009): Sozialstruktur und sozialer Wandel. In: Helmut Willems et al. (Hg.): Handbuch der sozialen und erzieherischen Arbeit. Luxemburg: Editions Saint-Paul; pp. 129-142. Ferro, Marc (1992): Comment on raconte l’histoire aux enfants à travers le monde entier. Paris: Payot. Keppler, Angela (1994): Tischgespräche. Über Formen der Vergemeinschaftung am Beispiel der Konversation in Familien. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Lequin, Yves & Jean Métral (1980a): À la recherche d’une mémoire collective: les métallurgistes retraités de Givors. Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 35(1): 149-166. – (1980b): Auf der Suche nach einem kollektiven Gedächtnis. Die Rentner der Metallindustrie von Givors. In: Lutz Niethammer (Hg.): Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis. Die Praxis der “Oral History”. Frankfurt/M.: Syndikat; pp. 249-271. Letzeburger Arbechter-Verband (LAV) (1966): 1916-1966. 50 Jahre Verband. Esch/Alzette: Luxemburger Genossenschaftsdruckerei.

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Maroldt, Ed (1997): De leschten Héichuewen. Les rendez-vous de la sidérurgie luxembourgeoise avec l’avenir. Documentation réalisée par Ed Maroldt. Esch-sur-Alzette: Editions Uelzecht Kanal. Onofhängege Gewerkschaftsbond Lëtzebuerg (OGB-L) (1986): 70 Joër Fräi Gewerkschaft fir déi Schaffend (1916-1986). Vom Berg- und Hüttenarbeiterverband über den LAV zum OGB-L. Esch-Alzette: OGB-L. Passerini, Luisa (1980): Arbeitersubjektivität und Faschismus. Mündliche Quellen und deren Impulse für die historische Forschung. In: Niethammer, Lutz (Hg.): Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis. Die Praxis der “Oral History”, Frankfurt/M.: Syndikat; pp. 214-248. Scuto, Denis (1999): 75 ans au service du monde ouvrier et du progrès social: La Chambre de travail (1924-1999). In: Chambre de travail. 75e anniversaire. Luxembourg: Chambre de travail; pp. 7-112. STATEC (2003): Portrait économique et social du Luxembourg. Luxembourg: Statec.

Questioning the Cultural Memory of the 1960s Communist Narratives in Contemporary British History 1 J OSEPH M ASLEN

In contemporary British history, there is a grand (national) narrative about the 1960s. The “sixties generation”, which experienced adolescence and young adulthood in that decade, remembers the transition from the “old-fashioned” 1950s as a change that affected it but not its parents’ generation. This sense of ownership over the period reflects a perception that the parents’ generation (at least in the “respectable” strata of society) concealed ruptures in their lives to present a façade of harmony during that time, whereas the “children of the sixties” embraced those stresses. However, the familial remembering processes of communists complicate this public discourse.

T HE S IXTIES G ENERATION The 1960s has a reputation for being the decade when Britain stepped out of its Victorian shadow. In 1967, in his poem Annus Mirabilis, Philip Larkin (192285) teased with the idea that the youth of the sixties changed everything: Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) – Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP (Larkin 1988:167). 1

I am grateful to the editors for their assistance and to Emma Katz for her support and advice.

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In the cultural memory of contemporary British history, that moment divides old times from new. In addition to Larkin’s humorous treatment of the subject, TV series such as The Swinging Sixties on UKTV’s Yesterday channel and coffeetable books such as From the Bomb to the Beatles by Juliet Gardiner (b. 1945) and London in the Sixties by George Perry (b. 1935) narrate a “youth-quake” that occurred in Britain between 1960 and 1970 (Gardiner 1999:114-153) and “transformed the cultural and social outlook of the western world” (Perry 2001: dust jacket front inlay). In this narrative, “1963” marks a coming of age that culminates in the student protests of “1968”. New developments in British history, and particularly the independence of the former British colonies, mirror the exploration of personal possibilities by the sixties generation. This narrative appears in several autobiographical texts written by the former “youth” of the sixties. A succession of these books from the twenty years between 1983 and 2003, by Richard Tames (b. 1946), Sara Maitland (b. 1950), Sheila Rowbotham (b. 1943), and Alison Pressley (b. 1947), emphasise their challenge to parental (and by extension societal) convention. Whether as illustrated coffee-table folios (Tames 1983, Pressley 2003) or as literary or academic publications (Maitland 1988a, Rowbotham 2000), the books agree that individual liberation did begin in 1963. Tames’ book opens by juxtaposing the end of Empire with the arrival of “words like ‘unisex’, ‘disco’, ‘denim’ and ‘boutique’” (Tames 1983:5), and, referencing Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s 1960 “winds of change” speech, notes that “[t]here were winds of change blowing through Britain as well” (ibid.:5). Pressley’s book is split into two parts, one on the fifties and one on the sixties, and captures the boundary between the two in the following quotation about the divide between parents’ and children’s individual expectations: “Boys and girls from working-class homes, with parents who had no academic aspirations, were now seeing themselves as university fodder” (Pressley 2003:116). Maitland’s book of women’s reminiscences and Rowbotham’s memoir of the decade likewise divide fifties repression from sixties liberation: “It was an unusual historic moment; it was very exciting; I grew up in the fifties – that is, I was twenty in 1960, and, by God, I deserved what happened later on” (Carter 1988:210, original italics); “My generation was still being brought up as if ignorance was akin to innocence. […] On the other hand, the entrances towards sexual freedom had opened and were beckoning, not only among the young intelligentsia but in popular culture” (Rowbotham 2000:23). In this narrative, the 1960s defined the destiny of the sixties generation. These narrators apply the convention of storytelling in which the action begins just as emerging forces destabilise the status quo, and identify this moment

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of disturbance with the prime of their youth. Tsvetan Todorov’s structural analysis of narrative defines such moments as a temporary disequilibrium: This term ‘equilibrium’, which I am borrowing from genetic psychology, means the existence of a stable but not static relation between the members of a society; it is a social law, a rule of the game, a particular system of exchange. The two moments of equilibrium, similar and different, are separated by a period of imbalance […] (Todorov 1969:75).

In the “equilibrium” narrative of the sixties generation, a temporary suspension of the “social law” provides an opportunity to re-shape the world: “In many ways it was a glorious interlude, the moment of release when the teacher leaves the room and the class realizes it is on temporary licence” (Perry 2001:6). That window closed when the “teacher” returned in the guise of Margaret Thatcher, according to the scholarly treatment of her politics by another member of the sixties generation, Dennis Kavanagh (b. 1941). His work outlines the unruly scene of “high inflation, low economic growth, trade union power, and weak government” and Thatcher’s response of reactionary fiscal and social policy (Kavanagh 1990:1). The reminiscences of those such as Tames, Pressley, Maitland and Rowbotham describe that second equilibrium. From the eighties onwards, in this narrative, market liberalism’s “system of exchange” extends the freedom of the economic sphere while closing off the social freedoms of “nineteen sixty-three”. These concerns surface in Maitland’s introduction: As the times get harder and it seems increasingly difficult even to manage decent strategies of resistance, let alone any truly creative political intervention against Thatcherism and the social injustices which are daily escalating, it seems to me more and more that I, at least, have to understand the sixties better, explore that terrain more carefully for signs both of hope and of self-criticism (Maitland 1988b:11).

The same narrative underpins Rowbotham’s comment on educational ideas: “In the late sixties an opening seemed to be appearing in the rigidity of the English class-bound education system. From the late seventies the right were to mobilize in earnest to exact revenge for that moment of freedom” (Rowbotham 2000:168). In this narrative, the “social law” of Thatcher’s Britain has an oppressive impact. The “politics of Thatcherism” re-establish the stability which the sixties generation had sought to undermine (Hall and Jacques 1983:10-11). Yet this narrative of temporary opportunity obscures other ways of narrating contemporary British history. Its cultural memory signifies a collective autobiog-

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raphy by the sixties generation about their journey from the first equilibrium of the fifties (childhood innocence) to the disequilibrium of the sixties (the wild teenage years) and the seventies (the coming-down of “middle-youth”) to the second equilibrium of the eighties (mature adulthood and disillusionment). I wish to interrogate this memory from the margins of contemporary British history by enquiring into the ways in which an older generation of communists reviewed the late twentieth century through their own processes of self-reflection.

T HE S IXTIES G ENERATION OF THE R EVOLUTION

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C HILDREN

So far, the study of the family memories of British communists has focused mainly on those who fit within the sixties generation, most importantly in the work of Phil Cohen (b. 1949), who has described himself as “a member of the so called ’60s generation” (Cohen 1997b:1). Cohen’s book Children of the Revolution (1997) explains his origins. His parents Eve (b. 1919) and Eric (b. 1912), who came from a similar Jewish radical background in Liverpool, named Phil after the Communist MP Phil Piratin (1907-95), and Cohen grew up within the movement before becoming a researcher at the University of East London’s cultural studies department. Children of the Revolution situates his life-history next to those of others who grew up as communists in post-war Britain, through a series of life-history monologues of about ten pages from thirteen men and women. Their birth dates, ranging from 1936 to 1961, cover a wider span than the aforementioned writers of the “growing up in the sixties” literature, but serve as the age range of those who could realistically have experienced the sixties as young people. Cohen’s contributors come from a range of backgrounds and (professional) occupations: My interview subjects are meant to be a cross-section who give a flavour of what a CP [Communist Party] upbringing was like, in as much as one can use that generic description. […] Among the people interviewed here are academics, writers, journalists and poets; there are teachers, lobbyists and entertainers also (Cohen 1997a:11, 189).

In order of appearance, contributions come from Cohen himself and from Jackie Kay (b. 1961), Alexi Sayle (b. 1952), Michael Rosen (b. 1946), Jude Bloomfield (b. 1953), Pat Devine (b. 1937), Nina Temple (b. 1956), Brian Pollitt (b. 1936), Hywel Francis (b. 1946), Ann Kane (b. 1942), Carole Woddis (b. 1943), Martin

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Jones (b. 1956), Mike Power (b. 1944), and Martin Kettle (b. 1949). These contributors all grew up in communist families after the Second World War, and collectively stand to represent (in the words of the publisher Lawrence & Wishart’s sub-title on the cover) Communist Childhood in Cold War Britain. Cohen’s conceptualisation of his subjects as “children of the (communist) revolution” involves the use of that phrase to differentiate his subjects from the wider generation of the sixties who participated in the mythologised social revolution of the decade. The phrase also appears in other contexts, in several books by non-communists, to frame a story of growing up with the legacy of revolutionary predecessors. Extrapolating from three books that appeared in 2008, by Dinaw Mengestu (b. 1978), Robert Gildea (b. 1952) and Nicholas Royle (b. 1968), the “child of the revolution” struggles with the echoes of an earlier generation. In the works of Mengestu, Gildea and Royle, as in Cohen’s book, those who see themselves as “children of the revolution” feel a sense of symbolic inheritance. Gildea’s academic research on European history currently involves a collaborative project on his generation’s revolutionary year, 1968 (Gildea 2007), and Royle’s compendium of short-stories by his generation, the forty-year-olds of 2008, fancifully imagines that 1968 connotes a mystical origin: “Maybe some of these ’68 babies were born and took their first breath and swallowed along with it a waft of revolutionary idealism” (Royle 2008:xii). In Mengestu’s novel and Gildea’s research, the revolution contains a stimulus to the future but also a legacy of the past that lingers in the present. Mengestu’s narrator Sepha Stephanos tells his story of being uprooted from revolutionary Ethiopia to move to the US and of those roots following him to his new home in Washington DC: There are twenty-eight floors to the building, and of those twenty-eight floors, at least twenty-six are occupied exclusively by other Ethiopians who, like my uncle, moved here sometime after the revolution and found to their surprise that they would never leave. […] Living here is as close to living back home as one can get, which is precisely why I moved out after two years and precisely why my uncle has never left (Mengestu 2008:115-116).

Gildea’s book narrates France’s nineteenth-century history through a series of five generations who each, in different ways, succeed the Revolution of 1789: “On every generation to which it gave birth the French Revolution left its mark. A mark of hope for a new dawn, a new order of the world, but also a mark of tragedy, of a project that came to grief in anarchy, bloodletting and despotism” (Gildea 2008:1).

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In Cohen’s book, the “children of the (communist) revolution” address their unease with being affiliated to their parents’ cohort; a situation that resulted in their inability to follow the path of the sixties generation. Rather than demonstrating the classic rebellion against culturally conformist parents, their narratives reverse that shift from mainstream culture to subculture. For example, the title of Cohen’s personal contribution to the text references his successful search for a more mainstream hero: “Red Roots: From Lenin to Lennon”. In this chapter, liberation involves self-expression through mass culture, and a rejection of self-denial within a political ghetto. The piece illustrates this argument in an image of Cohen as a ten year-old boy, marching through Liverpool on Saturday afternoon while wishing to have attended a football match instead (Cohen 1997a:13). His trajectory involves an emergence from the “false”, inherited subculture of communism into (a somehow self-determined) identification with the wider, more “real” mainstream culture of British society. In Cohen’s narrative, a passage about himself in his mid-twenties demonstrates the transition: When it came to finding a job in 1975 when I was unemployed, it seemed easier to accept an offer from [the communist newspaper] the Morning Star than to try alternative ways of building a career, as a freelance journalist or working on another paper. I did believe in the idea of a mass left-wing daily and hoped the Star could become that, but perhaps also I instinctively felt my parents would approve. At the paper I came up against CP members who wanted to maintain a rigid control over the paper as a party organ rather than expand the circulation on a wider basis. […] It was not a pleasant experience and left me wary of ideological commitment (ibid.: 28).

Cohen’s recollection deals with personal, as well as political, rejection. The lack of support from the old guard undermines his faith in his parents’ ideas. In Cohen’s personal story, and his narrative about the “children of the (communist) revolution”, the rupture with “ideological commitment” involves a reckoning with the parental generation. In this analysis, that generation appears in their dotage as adherents to less flexible visions of socialist utopia: One person who preferred not to take part [in the book] wrote to me that ‘my mother is now 89 years old and she would not approve.’ Mothers and fathers are still alive and may take exception to the questioning of political positions or ideas that they held at the time. But is that a reason for rejecting the validity of our experience, which is very different? In the end I thought not (ibid.: 18).

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Cohen’s narrative of personal family memory illustrates his feeling of distance from the older generation: Lastly, my thanks go to my father Eric ‘without whom all this would not have been possible’, as they say. He has not once questioned this project or expressed concern about my references to him in it. This could be seen as a deviously clever tactic so as to secure a more favourable comment from me – I prefer to regard it as a sign of his open-mindedness and his encouragement to me, which I value. I have often taken my stand and pitched my tent against some of the political views he has held and the severe cost of his beliefs to his family, but I have never doubted the sincerity with which he has held those beliefs (ibid.:12).

The subtext of Cohen’s “thanks” suggests an ambivalence towards his father. His discourse of recognition portrays his parents’ generation (the generation which embodies the revolution) as secure, and bloody-minded, in its convictions. This supposed equilibrium correlates with the broader perception of the generation of Cohen’s parents as a cohort whose “struggle for survival” in the Second World War all but removed their personal doubts (Szabo 1983:1). In Cohen’s book, his narrative assumes that his parents’ generation’s struggle followed a clear course. This assumption also appears in the book’s foreword by the novelist Gillian Slovo (b. 1952), daughter of the South African anti-Apartheid campaigners Ruth First and Joe Slovo (“whose CV had included being both general secretary and chairman of the South African Communist Party” (Slovo 1997:9)): “My parents and their comrades appeared to be so sure of themselves, that they were right in what they did and that they would win. […] For a child it was a hard act to follow” (ibid.:7). Paradoxically, the discourse of filial admiration silences the parents’ generation. In seeing the parents’ beliefs as unchanging over time, these “children of the (communist) revolution” present their parents’ views in a way which closer examination reveals to be lacking in subtlety.

T HE K ETTLE F AMILY The family history of one of the contributors to Cohen’s book particularly complicates the dominant discourses of “the sixties” in contemporary British history. The testimony of Martin Kettle, a journalist with the London Guardian newspaper, seems at first glance to emphasise the old fashioned communism of his parents, Margot Kettle nee Gale (1916-95) and Arnold Kettle (1916-86). I wish to explore the hidden complexities not only of Martin’s testimony but also of Mar-

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got and Arnold’s lives and politics, and, in doing so, to challenge the idea of the sixties as a unique era of transformation. Arnold married Margot as a fellow communist following his service in the Second World War. He became, first, a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Leeds (1947-70) while teaching in the WEA (Workers Educational Association) in Yorkshire, and, second, Professor of Literature at the Open University (1970-81) where his role involved the development of courses in literary subjects; and where, in the words of an admiring student, his teaching followed the University’s mission of giving students the platform “‘of an enhanced selfrespect, and not just of a university degree’” (Jefferson, Martin and Nandy 1982:7). Margot had become interested in politics as a girl in Edinburgh in the 1920s and served as the wartime president of the NUS (National Union of Students) before her marriage to Arnold in 1946, after which her career turned towards local Party activism in the places to which Arnold’s career took her. Margot worked in a low-key manner in local politics and then, after Arnold’s retirement due to Parkinson’s disease in 1981, served the odd “delicious lunch” for guests while caring for his health in their “picturesque cottage” in Milton Keynes (Kanwar and Kettle 1987:56). Interpersonally, the Kettles lived with another issue. Margot and Arnold refused to renounce the Party after the Hungarian Uprising and Khrushchev’s speech against Stalin in 1956; and the memoirs of one of Arnold’s contemporaries, the novelist Doris Lessing (b. 1919), ascribe some of his Party loyalty to his secret troubles with his sexuality. She provides this analysis while describing her and Arnold’s visit to Wroclaw, Poland as part of a British Communist delegation to the “World Congress of Intellectuals” in 1948: He was a homosexual, he confided – hardly a surprise – and said that before this trip he had gone to Harry Pollitt, the Communist Party boss, and told him he was worried, visiting the Soviet Union as a homosexual. […] Their decision was that it was all right, the Party would stand by him, but any approach by spies, pretty boys, and so forth should be at once reported to them. Arnold was emotional about this. It was then illegal in Britain to be a homosexual: people could and did go to prison. […] That ‘the Party itself’ should stand by him was, I believe, why Arnold remained a Communist when other people left in droves (Lessing 1998:76).

The complexities of the Kettles’ experiences hint at the potential of exploring the self-reflective processes of this older generation of British communists. In the post-sixties context, Arnold’s output as a scholar and Margot’s approach to her activism showed the intricacy of their attitude to their communism. This com-

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plexity disturbs the distinction between the Party loyalists of the parents’ generation and the “young rebels” of the sixties.

T HE K ETTLE F AMILY AND THE C HILDREN (C OMMUNIST ) R EVOLUTION

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The family memory of the Kettles in Cohen’s book does partly support the idea that the sixties generation differed from their parents. For instance, Martin Kettle’s testimony (which appears along with that of Martin Jones and Mike Power under the chapter heading “Asking the Question”) recalls his exasperation with his parents’ separatism: “I can remember being very mystified as to why my parents were so hostile to Churchill. […] Another person I disagreed with my parents about was Kennedy” (Cohen 1997a:185). Under the heading, “Killing with Kindness”, his commentary brands this isolation as abusive: “[…] I have talked to psychoanalysts about it […]. It [the Communist Party] was a form of shielding from the realities of life […] Marxism had painted this picture in which you didn’t have to examine things yourself, and to do so was a bit of a diversion.” Kettle’s testimony contrasts his outspokenness with his parents’ respect for the Party: “Our parents always said, when something was wrong, ‘But you have to think about the Soviet Union and the international situation’ – so you could never actually say it was wrong” (Cohen 1997a:186-187). Similarly, Lessing’s testimony critiques Martin’s father’s attachment to Stalinism in the 1940s: My attitude towards Comrade Stalin by that time was less than reverential. But Arnold could not bear to have a word said against him: he was one of those who believed the truth was being concealed from Stalin by his colleagues. Arnold was suffering because of the many ‘mistakes’ the Party was making (Lessing 1998:76).

Her summary of Arnold’s character asserts his general need for subservience: “He was a man who needed to respect authority, just as I needed to oppose it” (Cohen 1997a:76). Yet, in Cohen’s book, Martin’s appraisal of his parents’ relationship with the Party does acknowledge the limits of their connection. His account maps out a change over time: I think my parents were much more loyal to the British Communist Party than they were to the Soviet Union, and they were sceptics of the Soviet Union from the 1950s onwards.

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[…] They still tended to defend the Soviet Union, in the sense of saying, ‘You have got to understand how they see it’, but it wasn’t a case of, ‘If the Soviet Union says it it must be right and we must say that’ (ibid.:180).

His testimony also appreciates Arnold’s desire for a critical distance from the British CP: “I can remember my father saying, years ago, that the trouble with the communist parties of western Europe was that they all got stuck at the start of the Cold War and that was where they now were, and that was true” (ibid.:184). Paradoxically, Martin’s testimony signals that the loosening of his parents’ ties to the political side of Party life influenced their decision to stay in the CP after 1956. His commentary notes how there was room within their Party life for their passions: “We often went on holidays with communists. [… B]ut we didn’t go to Eastern Europe. My parents, and particularly my father, had this love affair with Italy, and he wanted to go to Italy as often as he possibly could; and Yugoslavia, where he had been in the war; our holidays increasingly took us to Yugoslavia” (ibid.:182). By pointing out his parents’ aversion to the subservient Soviet states, Martin’s testimony undermines part of the grand narrative of Cohen’s book: Cohen’s (and the publisher’s) “Cold War” story of growing up as a child of communist parents in post-war Britain. By contrast, Martin’s words ascribe a personal character to his parents’ communism. From the sixties onwards, their course had diverged from Cold War politics despite (or rather because of) their decision not to follow “a lot of [Arnold’s] friends” out of the Party (ibid.:181182). The individuality of Arnold’s communism in the 1960s and 1970s seems to have revolved around sensitivity, in the two senses of emotion and understanding. Dipak Nandy’s remarks on Arnold’s life refer to his recurrent use of the verb “to put one’s finger on” in scholarship and conversation, and to his “sense of touch […] moral rather than technical” as a foundation of his thought (Nandy 1988:4). In Arnold’s writings, that notion of moral touch appears in several places; in his interpretation of the novels of Thomas Hardy, man relates with nature as “[m]an is a part of nature which he touches and transforms through his work, thereby transforming himself” (Kettle 1967b:11). In Arnold’s account of politics, similarly, the communism of Karl Marx galvanises the “practical forces” of revolution, unlike the visionary “dreams” of utopian socialists (Kettle 1963:66) and idealists who, “by emphasising ‘values’ and ‘motives’ rather than the actual hard facts of a situation, […] see actions as ‘impure’” (Kettle 1965:14). The literary critic serves here as the visionary who helps to change society for the better. Instead of merely taking note of technical features, Arnold’s An

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Introduction to the English Novel advocates a more fundamental assessment: “It is not enough to consider a novel, any more than a poem or a play, simply in terms of plot construction and characters. We have to see each novel whole before we can attempt to assess the parts or even to decide the criteria relevant to our judgements” (Kettle 1967a:7). That emphasis on seeing the mechanics of texts universally links with Arnold’s blaming of universities for “[t]he fragmentation of the human consciousness [into separate fields of interest] which Marxism diagnoses and seeks to cure”, and his admission that critics such as himself turn to Marxism to heal those divisions within themselves, out of a “desire to make their lives whole” (Arnold 1975:1, 3). The reference to “impulses” indicates the emotion of Arnold’s critical practice. In his Shakespeare in a Changing World, his aim appears to be to explore an intensity of feeling rather than a system of logic: The humanist tradition cannot be described as though it were a set of unchanging ideas, much less a revealed philosophy. It implies, rather, […] a refusal to accept despair, a firm determination to see the social being man and the world he lives in as clearly, truly, objectively as possible, and a deep conviction […] that this can be done (Kettle 1964:11, my italics).

His introduction to one of his Open University module readers summons this intensity of feeling, noting that: […] if some of our Open University students, ploughing their way through the pages of this anthology, are seized with some sort of impatience or even revulsion, we don’t at all ask them to repress those emotions, which may well express a justified reaction against some of the accepted ways of ‘treating’ literature academically (Kettle 1972:6).

Martin Kettle’s output, far from rebelling against that of his father, traced Arnold’s concerns in its “post-sixties” themes of peaceful dialogue. These similarities arise in Martin’s early criticism of arbitrary police power, from his research for the Cobden Trust on the police’s use of the 1934 Incitement to Disaffection Act to close off dissent (Young assisted by Kettle 1976) to his rebuke over their secrecy regarding “highly sensitive” issues of public order (Kettle 1980:33) and his call for “good relations with the community, [and] a readiness to listen” after the 1981 Brixton Riots (Kettle and Hodges 1982:95). These each echoed his father’s emphasis on delicacy, reciprocity, and mutuality. Arnold’s sensitivity implies the influence of Margot, who grew up with a Theosophical spiritualist background, belonged to youth groups of the League of

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Nations Union, and established the African Studies Library at Leeds during Arnold’s time there in the 1960s. In the reminiscences of others, Margot’s activism took shape communally rather than pedagogically. Martin’s statement describes her way of proposing communism almost as a mainstream religion: I think my parents saw themselves, certainly in my mother’s case, as bringing good news to the masses. She had a missionary zeal. But not in the sense of bombarding people with leaflets; on the contrary, she would explain to people how sensible communists were and what nice people they were, people like you and me (Cohen 1997a:180).

Martin’s recollection of his mother’s social sensibility tallies with that of Sir Norman Lindop (b. 1921), who became a senior local politician in Hertfordshire but who as a young man during wartime: “went to the NUS council meetings and that was how I got to know Margot Gale (later Kettle), the NUS secretary. […] I can remember how impressed I was by Margot, who was very moderate and reasonable and hardly ever raised her voice” (Lindop 2003:64). Lindop’s testimony continues that: “[l]ater I began to realise that Margot also was probably a communist […]” (ibid.) but that her communism had remained an incidental aspect of her political identity; and her son’s recollections suggest (albeit somewhat patronisingly) that her campaigning centred on personal feelings rather than political opinions: “Any support my mother got from standing in elections was entirely due to the fact that people liked and admired her as a person, and not in any sense because they wanted to support the British Communist Party” (Cohen 1997a:180). This image of Margot’s combining of international politics with local friendships fits with Karen Hunt and June Hannam’s idea of a “women’s politics” that bypasses national centres of power (Hunt and Hannam 2011). The cultural dimension of Margot and Arnold’s local communism (or maybe, in Hunt and Hannam’s terms, their “women’s communism”) aligns with the liberal “lifestyle politics” which the younger, sixties generation spearheaded in later life (Gilleard and Higgs 2002:380). As Raphael Samuel’s essay “The Lost World of British Communism” indicated in 1985, the sixties generation’s version of Marxism put less emphasis on theories of historical destiny and class struggle (towards a utopia that the socialist Soviet state embodied) than on practices of textual and social criticism and intellectual community (Samuel 1985:22-25). In common with Margot’s and Arnold’s political work, these enterprises involved small gatherings where like-minded souls could relax in a non-coercive atmosphere.

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In this way, the free-thinking movement of the sixties generation could chime with the culture of their communist parents. Understanding this resonance requires an awareness of the body of ideas that shaped the parental generation’s particular form of communism. Their politics had room for evolution in later life because the communism of their youth, in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, had represented a context-specific manifestation of older ideas that had the flexibility to resurface time and again, from generation to generation, in different political formations. The distinction I draw between the liberal attitude of Margot and Arnold and the perceived authoritarianism of their generation maps onto Clare Midgley’s splitting of nineteenth century women’s politics: “between the Unitarian tradition, with its emphasis on educating individuals so that they could find their own path to religious truth, and mainstream evangelicalism, with its stress on Salvationism and conversion” (Midgley 2010:149). The sense of communion which I ascribe to the Kettles’ local communism correlates with Barbara Taylor’s description of nineteenth century socialism: Socialism was not only a political commitment – it was a way of life. Joining a Socialist branch meant automatic entrée to a wide range of cultural and social events intended not only to educate and entertain their participants, but also ‘to bind them together with ties of communal fellowship’, thereby providing an emotional preparation for the New Life to come (Taylor 1983:217).

In such cells, the social politics of sexual intercourse and women’s liberation began much earlier than “1963”. The intellectual community of the Kettles’ youth and later life drew on certain themes from the socialist and feminist politics of the nineteenth century. Those movements perhaps cared less for fixed political projects and more for women such as Margot “forming friendships and freely exchanging ideas” with men such as Arnold (Bland 1990:34) and “creating for themselves […] a social milieu of active women […] whose friendship offered support and sustenance in the fight” (Levine 1990:69).

C ONCLUSION The Kettles’ family memory reveals a complexity that transcends the typical accounts of the sixties generation and their parents. The communism of Margot and Arnold Kettle represented a community that offered interpersonal support in difficult circumstances. Leaving politics aside, and using a reference point from the Kettles’ lifetimes, perhaps Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s sociological

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classic Family and Kinship in East London (1957) conveys the type of community that gave the Party its meaning for the Kettles in later life. In Young and Willmott’s sketch of ’50s Bethnal Green, long-standing neighbours look after each other: “The exclusiveness in the home runs alongside an attitude of friendliness to other people living in the same street. Quite often people have themselves lived there for a long time […] and consequently know many of the other residents well” (Young and Willmott 1957:85). This analogy of traditional East End life works well for communists such as Margot and Arnold Kettle. Their mentality had moved on from the Cold War and World Revolution to neighbourliness with fellow comrades. Martin’s elevation from the inherited communist subculture into the wider mainstream culture of British society actually traced an earlier (if less traumatic) shift by his parents. The cultural memory of the 1960s as a youth-quake comes from the sixties generation’s monopoly of public discourse on the decade. Against this grand narrative, the experiences of their parents’ generation constitute peripheral memories. The Kettles’ story involves a journey of emotional and political complexities, transitions and nuances by the parents as well as the “children” of the revolution. Margot and Arnold could still feel an emotional attachment to their heyday as young communists in the 1920s and 1930s; yet nonetheless their older selves took the leap of, in Cohen’s words, “asking the question”.

R EFERENCES Bland, Lucy (1990): Rational Sex or Spiritual Love? The Men and Women’s Club of the 1880s. Women’s Studies International Forum 13(1-2): 33-48. Carter, Angela (1988): Truly, It Felt Like Year One. In: Sara Maitland (Ed.): Very Heaven: Looking Back at the 1960s. London: Virago; pp. 209-216. Cohen, Phil (1997a): Children of the Revolution. London: Lawrence & Wishart. – (1997b): Rethinking the Youth Question. Education, Labour and Cultural Studies. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Gardiner, Juliet (1999): From the Bomb to the Beatles. The Changing Face of Post-War Britain 1945-1965. London: Collins & Brown. Gildea, Robert (2008): Children of the Revolution. The French, 1799-1914. London: Allen Lane. – (2007): Around 1968. Activism, Networks, Trajectories. Oxford: University of Oxford (Modern European History Research Centre). Gilleard, Chris & Paul Higgs (2002): The Third Age. Class, Cohort or Generation? Ageing and Society 22: 369-382.

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Hall, Stuart & Martin Jacques (1983): Introduction. In: Hall, Stuart & Martin Jacques (Eds.): The Politics of Thatcherism. London: Lawrence & Wishart; pp. 9-16. Hunt, Karen & June Hannam: Towards an Archaeology of Interwar Women’s Politics: The Local and the Everyday. The Aftermath of Suffrage: What Happened After the Vote Was Won? (Unpubl. conference paper, Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield, 24-25 June 2011). Jefferson, Douglas, Graham Martin & Dipak Nandy (1982): Introduction. In: Jefferson, Douglas & Graham Martin (Eds.): The Uses of Fiction. Essays on the Modern Novel in Honour of Arnold Kettle. Milton Keynes: Open University Press; pp. 1-8. Kanwar, Asha S. & Arnold Kettle (1987): An Interview with Arnold Kettle. Social Scientist 15(7): 54-61. Kavanagh, Dennis (1990): Thatcherism and British Politics: The End of Consensus? Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kettle, Arnold (1975): Foreword. In: West, Alick: Crisis and Criticism, and Selected Essays. London: Lawrence & Wishart; pp. 1-3. – (1972): Introduction. In: Arnold Kettle (Ed.): The Nineteenth-Century Novel. Critical Essays and Documents. London: Heinemann; pp. 1-9. – (1967a): An Introduction to the English Novel, Volume 1. Second Edition. London: Hutchinson. – (1967b): Hardy the Novelist. A Reconsideration. The W. D. Thomas Memorial Lecture, Delivered at the University College of Swansea on November 28, 1966. Swansea: University College of Swansea. – (1965): Communism and the Intellectuals. London: Lawrence & Wishart. – (1964): Introduction. In: Kettle, Arnold (Ed.): Shakespeare in a Changing World. London: Lawrence & Wishart; pp. 9-16. – (1963): Karl Marx. Founder of Modern Communism. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Kettle, Martin (1980): The Politics of Policing and the Policing of Politics. In: Kettle, Martin, Duncan Campbell & Joanna Rollo: Policing the Police. Vol. 2. London: Calder. Kettle, Martin & Lucy Hodges (1982): Uprising! The Police, the People and the Riots in Britain’s Cities. London: Pan. Larkin, Philip (1988): Annus Mirabilis. In: Thwaite, Anthony (Ed.): Philip Larkin. Collected Poems. London: Marvell. Lessing, Doris (1998): Walking in the Shade. Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962. London: Flamingo.

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Levine, Philippa (1990): Love, Friendship, and Feminism in Later 19th-Century England. Women’s Studies International Forum 13(1-2): 63-78. Lindop, Norman (2003): Cambridge Communism in the 1930s and 1940s: Reminiscences and Reflections. Socialist History 24: 39-77. Maitland, Sara (1988a): Very Heaven. Looking Back at the 1960s. London: Virago. – (1988b): I Believe in Yesterday. An Introduction. In: Maitland, Sara (Ed.): Very Heaven. Looking Back at the 1960s. London: Virago; pp. 1-15. Mengestu, Dinaw (2008): Children of the Revolution. Leicester: Ulverscroft. Midgley, Clare (2010): Women, Religion and Reform. In: Morgan, Sue & Jacqueline Devries (Eds.): Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800-1940. London: Routledge; pp. 138-158. Nandy, Dipak (1988): Arnold Kettle and English Marxist Literary Criticism. In: Martin, Graham & W. R. Owens (Eds.): Literature and Liberation. Selected Essays. Arnold Kettle. Manchester: Manchester University Press; pp. 1-17. Perry, George (Ed.) (2001): London in the Sixties. London: Pavilion. Pressley, Alison (2003): The 50s & 60s: The Best of Times. Growing Up and Being Young in Britain. London: Michael O’Mara. Rowbotham, Sheila (2000): Promise of a Dream. Remembering the Sixties. London: Allen Lane. Royle, Nicholas (2008a): ’68. New Stories from Children of the Revolution. Cambridge: Salt. – (2008b): Introduction. In: Royle, Nicholas (Ed.): ’68. New Stories from Children of the Revolution. Cambridge: Salt; pp. ix-xiv. Samuel, Raphael (1985): The Lost World of British Communism. New Left Review I/154: 3-53. Slovo, Gillian (1997): Foreword. In: Cohen, Phil: Children of the Revolution. London: Lawrence & Wishart; pp. 7-9. Szabo, Stephen F. (1983): Introduction. In: Szabo, Stephen F. (Ed.): The Successor Generation. International Perspectives of Postwar Europeans. London: Butterworths; pp. 1-3. Tames, Richard (1983): Growing Up in the 1960s. London: Batsford. Taylor, Barbara (1983): Eve and the New Jerusalem. Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century. London: Virago. Todorov, Tzvetan (1969): Structural Analysis of Narrative (Translation Arnold Weinstein). Novel. A Forum on Fiction 3 (1): 70-76. Young, Michael & Peter Willmott (1957): Family and Kinship in East London. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Young, Thom (1976): Incitement to Disaffection. London: Cobden Trust.

Remembering Socialism, Living Post-Socialism Gender, Generation and Ethnicity D ANIELA K OLEVA

We seem to live in an age where grand narratives have already lost their power. However, in a sense, perhaps our time does have a “grand narrative” of its own – the one of coping with the past. Issues of remembering and dealing with problematic pasts are equally salient for post-Holocaust, post-communist, postapartheid, post-conflict, post-genocide contexts; questions of memory and identity are equally central for nations, institutions, localities and families. The ongoing “memory craze” in contemporary societies is paralleled by a vibrant development of memory studies, which however has not moved far beyond the state of “a nonparadigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless enterprise” (Olick and Robbins 1998: 106), as described more than a decade ago. This situation justifies attempts to make sense of research findings by a recourse to authors and ideas that have set the agenda and provided the conceptual tools for the study of memory as a social phenomenon. Maurice Halbwachs’ theory of memory was at odds with his contemporary intellectual Zeitgeist. In a time when Darwinism was still a model scientific theory, human heredity was the focus of research and eugenics was widely accepted as a social philosophy, Halbwachs insisted on the social rather than hereditary nature of human memory. Building his explanatory model on cultural, rather than biological premises, he reached particularly intriguing inferences as far as family memory is concerned (Halbwachs 1952: 109-130). While family, according to him, is a paramount unit of transmission, the handing down of memories across generations appeared not to be a result of phylogenetic development but of the “framing” of individuals’ memories within the family as a social group.

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Although it is individuals who remember, they are always part of social groups with shared beliefs. Therefore, individuals always remember as group members, whereby their recollections are “mutually supportive of each other” (Halbwachs 1980: 48). Thus memory turns out to be instrumental for the continuity and the cohesion of the group, expressed in “its logic and its traditions” (Halbwachs 1952: 130). Unity and the ways of achieving it were indeed what interested Halbwachs. While individual memory is socially mediated, this mediation is relevant not to any group but only to those that conceive of themselves in terms of a common past and could therefore be called “mnemonic communities” (Zerubavel 1997: 18). Family is certainly such a community, and an essential one. However, every individual, as Halbwachs noted, belongs to more than one social group (Halbwachs 1952: 128) and, consequently, more than one mnemonic community. Therefore individual memories are mediated in different ways. It is this complexity and its implications that I would like to address here. I am going to engage with a case of what could be considered collective memory in the narrow sense introduced by Halbwachs, i.e. informal everyday communication related to the past and characterised with non-specialisation, reciprocity of roles, disorganisation and thematic instability (Assmann 1995: 126). The question is, in which ways and to what extent family memory articulates the solidarity of the family group and, conversely, if and how it appears as a contested terrain for the competing versions of different generations. In other words, is individual memory an expression of family memory in “its logic and its traditions” or is it rather an attempt at liberation from these traditions or at changing or re-negotiating them? To reply to this question, I will need to take recourse to a broader meaning of collective memory and a broader notion of mnemonic community as well.1 Such recourse will make it possible to broach the question of how personal remembering is shaped by family members “framing” their memories in different ways based on their belonging to other social groups. Does this membership have repercussions on family memory or do these other groups just envelop the family without penetrating into it (Halbwachs 1952: 121)?

1

Many contemporary researchers tend to broaden the concept of collective memory/collective remembering to embrace ‘imagined communities’ of almost any scale, including nations (e.g. Wertsch 2002). Halbwachs himself also seems to transcend the initial narrower meaning related to specific collectivities in his later Topographie légendaire des Evangiles en Terre Sainte: étude de mémoire collective (1941). In this regard, Jan Assmann’s distinction between communicative and cultural memory is also useful (Assmann 2001).

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In seeking answers to these questions, I will consider the case of a mother and a daughter belonging to the Turkish minority in Bulgaria. Their female sex and their ethnicity impose on them the necessity to negotiate a double marginality in present-day Bulgarian society. While the family group provides important resources of which both women make use, there are significant differences due to generation-specific experiences and outlooks. Both women were interviewed in the framework of a feminist oral history project focussing on minority women in an attempt to explore their double marginality. 2 The interviews were comprised of a first part in which the narrator’s life story was elicited and of a semistructured second part discussing gender roles and power in the interviewee’s family of origin and her own family, gender issues at the workplace and gender relations in contemporary Bulgaria, etc. The idea was to capture the handing down of gender roles between generations as well as their presumed change. Although family memory was not a topic of specific interest, it can be traced in the narratives.

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The Turkish minority is the largest in Bulgaria, 9.6% of the total population, concentrated in the northeastern and southeastern parts of the country, where in some places Turks constitute a local majority. Its origin goes back to the Ottoman conquest of the Balkan peninsula in the 14-15th century. After the establishment of the modern Bulgarian state in 1878, the state policy towards the Turks was quite contradictory and remained so after the communist coup in 1944: from encouraging Turkish culture (1940s-1950s) to forced assimilation and forced emigration to Turkey (1984-85 and 1989 respectively). The goal of the Bulgarian Communist Party (in power from 1945-1990) was to create an ethnically homogeneous “unified socialist Bulgarian nation”. This policy included a massive “research” campaign where the legitimation discourse of the offi-

2

Voices of Their Own: Oral History of Women from Five Minorities in Bulgaria, Bulgarian Association of University Women – Open Society Fund 2002-2003. More than half of the interviewees were of Turkish, Pomak (Bulgarian-speaking Muslims), Jewish, Armenian and Roma origin. Where possible, mothers and their adult daughters were invited to take part. A selection of the life-story interviews collected in the course of the project is published in English. See Daskalova 2004. I am indebted to Reneta Roshkeva, a co-participant in the project, for helping me deepen my knowledge of the case presented here.

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cial historiography was developed. Bulgarian Turks were “proved” to be descendants of islamised Bulgarians and their present ethnic identity was characterised as “divergent”, even “negative” thus providing rationale for the “normalisation” processes that followed. Their “integration” into the monolithic Bulgarian nation was declared to be voluntary but was carried out under pressure that generated resistance. The imposition of new identities took place via a change of Muslim names in 1984-85; this was called the “Revival process” by its creators. The re-naming campaign was carried out within a few months and was followed by further assimilation measures such as a ban on the Turkish language, traditional Muslim clothing, religious expression, rituals such as circumcision, etc. This policy brought about a politicisation of ethnicity, a fixation of ethnic boundaries and reinforcement of negative ethnic stereotypes. All elements characteristic of the belonging to the Turkish ethnic community were regarded by the communist authorities as hostile and threatening. As a result of this policy, about 300 thousand Bulgarian Turks emigrated to Turkey in the summer of 1989. With the start of the democratic changes, from early 1990 on, Bulgarian Turks were allowed to restore their Muslim names, to speak their language freely and to practice their religion. About half of the emigrants returned. However, the memory of this radical injustice and its articulations by individuals and groups continues to be a key factor for the construction of meanings in the social interactions between Bulgarians and Turks in the mixed population regions up to this day.

T HE M AHMUDOVS C ASE Nadya and Gyulnaz Mahmudova live in the city of Rousse, a major urban centre in Northeast Bulgaria. They were interviewed by Reneta Roshkeva, researcher at the Regional Museum of History, Rousse, in 2003. Nadya Mahmudova, widow, was born in 1936 in a village near Rousse. She is Turkish, has secondary education, which for her time and milieu was “equal to a university”. In her late teens, she was an activist of the Young Communist League helping to recruit and organise Turkish girls from the nearby villages. She worked for one year as a kindergarten teacher but had to quit when “regular teachers” came because her education was not adequate. She married a furniture

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maker, a Tatar3 from Rousse. After the birth of her second child, she completed a course in machine embroidery and worked privately to add to the family budget till the children grew up. When they started school, she found a job as a saleswoman. At the age of 45 she had surgery and thereafter worked at a coat check till her retirement. After the operation she returned to reading the Koran which she had learnt in her childhood. Thus she became an informal hodja (Muslim priest), invited to perform private ceremonies, and gained the respect of the Muslim community in the city. Gyulnaz Mahmudova was born in 1960 as Nadya’s first child. She completed a specialised secondary school in economics and worked as an economist at a machinery factory. When the factory was closed down in 1993, Gyulnaz remained unemployed for a few years. At the time of the interview, she was taking care of her four-year old child and lived with her mother and her partner who supported the family. Her partner was Bulgarian and that was why her parents had opposed the relationship. Only after nine years of dating, and after her father’s death, could they start living together and have a child. Gyulnaz feels confident about this situation and believes that her cohabitation “is working better than all formal marriages”. I propose now to look into the two women’s reminiscences from the point of view of ethnic and generational memory while not forgetting that each of these is necessarily gendered. The idea is to explore how the membership in different mnemonic communities (i.e. different subjects of collective memory, to use Halbwachs’ term) is negotiated and how these interact with each other in personal and familial remembering.

3

The Tatars are a Turkic ethnic group that settled in present-day Northeast Bulgaria first in the 13th century. With the Russian annexation of the Crimean Khanate in the 18th-19th century, thousands of Tatars settled in the Ottoman Empire as religious immigrants. After Bulgaria’s independence (1878), many emigrated to Turkey and those who stayed – unable to practice endogamy because of their small number – were to a significant extent assimilated by the neighbouring Turks. After 1944, this process was aided by the communist state, which did not recognise the existence of a Tatar population in Bulgaria. Today they constitute a small minority (under 2000 persons according to the 2001 census) living predominantly among the Turks in Northeast Bulgaria.

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F AMILY M EMORY

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Traditionally in charge of the home and the family, women are often considered custodians of family memory as well. Their narratives as a rule are structured according to what Tamara Hareven has termed “family time” (Hareven 1982) and are particularly rich in associations tied to house and objects (Favart-Jardon 2002). Contrary to this expectation, there are no common stories, no family mythology, no common time markers or references to familial spaces/objects in the two interviews. One reason might be that most of their kin emigrated to Turkey, which resulted in the lack of an extended community which is helpful in sustaining family narratives. Another possible reason is that Nadya married a Tatar from outside of her village who, albeit Muslim as well, was member of another group – a fact mentioned only by her daughter, not by herself. In both cases, the result would be ‘amnesia’ brought about by the disintegration of social networks. But the two women share the same notions of family, gender roles, child rearing, etc. Thus family memory can be seen as operative at the level of habitus (Bourdieu) as a set of embodied predispositions fostering particular orientations at the expense of others, or at the level of “common sense as a cultural system” (Geertz), a body of knowledge and attitudes, beliefs and concepts stemming from shared values and shared experiences that is often hard to articulate. Contrary to the stereotypes of their gender and their ethnic group, family does not seem to be central in both Nadya’s and Gyulnaz’s self-presentations, even though a good deal of the interviewer’s questions relate to their families of origin and their own families. This is more evident in the mother’s case: her spontaneous narration is centred around her education and her youth activism, and later on, around her achievements in studying and reciting the Koran. She tells about her husband and her parents mostly when prompted by the interviewer. The daughter is less articulate and most of the time prefers to follow the interviewer’s questions. Therefore it is worth noting on which topics she takes the initiative to expand her answers: her cohabitation with her Bulgarian partner (a theme to which she keeps returning), her education, and her experience of the assimilation campaign. When they tell about their work, both mother and daughter remember in terms of their gender: both worked with men and managed no worse than men. Both demonstrate self-confidence as women: For eight months I worked surrounded by men all the time. … That’s how it was then, that’s how it is now. I see thousands of men and I am not afraid of anyone, absolutely (Nadya, in: Daskalova 2004: 78). I have a strong spirit, like a man. … When we were repairing the house, it was me who got the permits from the town hall and did all kinds of things

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like that. … I’ve managed all of this like a man, much better than he could (Nadya, ibid.: 82-83). I feel very comfortable [to be a woman]. I think we are more… We are better at manipulating men. We are stronger than them in many respects. Maybe that comes from nature too. In many respects we are spiritually stronger (Gyulnaz, ibid.: 93). At the same time, both mother and daughter seem to reproduce traditional patriarchal ways of thinking about gender relations in the family. Each of them shows respect for her father. Nadya praises her father for having been “different”, i.e. more tolerant and understanding, while Gyulnaz admits that she was close to hers: had she got pregnant out of wedlock, she would have told him first. Nevertheless, she did not start living with her partner till after her father’s death because he opposed it. Both mother and daughter accept men’s leading role as being “natural” and “traditional”, and do not challenge it: I think it’s tradition. He [her husband] really cared about the Turkish tradition. He always wanted to have everything his way (Nadya, ibid.: 79). Because that’s how the world was created. The man is, generally speaking, the head of the family. You adopt his name. That’s a tradition. Society is organised like that. And that’s how it should be. And the other things are women’s priority. The house, etc. … That’s how it works all over the world. That’s how it’s always been. … That’s why I believe that nature has made this decision in such a way that there might be no other force to compete with nature about it. I believe that this comes from God and from nature (Gyulnaz, ibid.: 89-90). It might be worth asking if and to what extent the interview’s feminist agenda may have generated a bias toward what the interviewees perceived the interviewer would like to hear. What can beyond doubt be observed here, are the results of the ambivalent communist emancipation that opened up new walks of life for women that required them to make their own contribution to the “building of socialism”, i.e. to labour in the public sector. At the same time, it did not challenge traditional patriarchal relations in the family. These have remained deeply entrenched as unquestioned and unconditionally followed gender models in the family habitus, passed down between generations. Or, as Gyulnaz puts it, “You watch your parents and then you do the same, unaware.” The interview agenda’s call for reflection reveals the unreflected and quasi-automatic operation of memory as habitus. The interviewees seem to find that only instances that diverge from this habitus deserve to be mentioned and explained.

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E THNICITY : D ISTINCTIONS

Ethnicity does not seem particularly salient to the two women’s selfpresentations (possibly because gender is foregrounded in the project), except in a couple of instances. The most important is Gyulnaz’s choice of a Bulgarian as a partner. This is precisely a case of divergence from the tacit norm that in turn lends that norm visibility. Family memory – as a set of practised models (habitus), rather than as genealogies or stories/narratives about events – has had a role in Nadya’s plans about her daughter’s life. She admits that she has tried to arrange for Gyulnaz to marry a Turk: The only thing I have not managed to do is to have Gyulnaz marry the right man. I did not manage to do this. And I tried so hard! (Daskalova 2004: 85). First, these expectations reveal a gendered construction of family loyalty: the parents have a vision of the “right man” (not as a particular person but as a type of man) that a good daughter is supposed to accept. Furthermore, since the “right man” is necessarily of the same ethnic group, the concept of family seems to relate to that of ethnicity:4 Nadya’s notion of ethnicity is shaped by a concept of family. Just as the family group is based on biological relations of parenthood and sister/brotherhood, the ethnic group appears to be the same kind of “natural”, biological entity. It is therefore no wonder that family loyalty heavily overlaps with the maintenance of the ethnic community in Nadya’s view. Thus, through family, ethnic identity also becomes gendered: as Katri Komulainen has argued, women are portrayed as “reproducers” of ethnic and national boundaries simply “by enacting proper feminine behaviour” (Komulainen 2003: 71). This is where the diffuse normativity inherent in the habitus crystallises into clear-cut ethnic distinctions and ensuing social distances, i.e. into explicit norms imposed by the group. Having a Bulgarian partner, Gyulnaz has challenged the boundaries of her ethnic community and the norms associated with them. Therefore, it is perceived as a threat that could lead to the family’s condemnation by the Turkish community. During the interview, these are the only specific arguments against Gyulnaz’s choice of partner that her mother articulates as both her late husband’s and her own fears: “but what were people going to say”; “people are different,

4

For similar observations about conceiving ethnicity in terms of the family, but in a very different situation, see Komulainen 2003.

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some people are very rude”.5 By diverging from the life scenario charted out in the form of her parents’ expectations, Gyulnaz has taken a negative position towards her family’s symbolic heritage as related to their ethnic identity. At the same time, she has not opted out of the family/ethnic group.6 The difficulties she has encountered in trying to be independent while still managing not to break the family bonds (tensions between individualism and belonging) have led to her decision to date her partner in secret for nine years. Persisting with her relationship, Gyulnaz has to some extent followed her mother’s example as a model of independence. The interviewer notices this aspect of continuity, or “logic” (to use Halbwachs’ term) in the family genealogy and comments to Nadya about her daughter: “It looks like she takes after you”. However, neither of the interviewees addresses this similarity during the talk. Although Gyulnaz follows the same “logic”, her choice of partner contradicts the “family spirit” (Halbwachs) firmly anchored in her group’s ethnic identity. The mother has made the compromise of accepting her daughter’s choice of partner, i.e. surrendering the normative family scenario for the sake of preserving the interpersonal emotional relations 7 – but only after her husband’s death, a fact that points to the gender hierarchy in the family: But I only agreed to Gyulnaz’s marriage after her father died. He was against it. He said: “How are we to talk to people after that?” He always took part in the upbringing of the children, and he never treated Turks and Bulgarians differently. But he kept saying: “How are we to talk to people?” and that’s what bothered him (Daskalova 2004: 86).

5

It should be kept in mind that Nadya may have chosen to withhold other arguments due to the fact that the interviewer herself is Bulgarian, e.g. ones based on negative Turkish stereotypes about Bulgarians.

6

It is not clear from the interview how Gyulnaz has been accepted by her partner’s parents. The fact that he lives with her in her mother’s home suggests that tensions might have existed on their side as well. A recent study of social distances between ethnic groups in Bulgaria has found that only 15.4% of ethnic Bulgarians find marriage to a Turk acceptable for themselves or their children (Pamporov 2009: 31).

7

It is not clear if and to what extent another normative pressure has been at work here: by the time Gyulnaz started to live with her partner, she was in her mid-30s, i.e. already a “spinster” by the standards of her parents’ generation. Nadya may well have considered spinsterhood an even worse life scenario for her daughter than living with a Bulgarian.

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As in other mother-daughter pairs, intergenerational relations are viewed more positively by the elder generation. Nadya actually relies on her daughter’s partner as the bread-winner of the family and concludes in a conciliatory manner: I have read a lot and I believe now that this is destiny. They were created for each other (ibid.: 85). This remark by Nadya appears to be part of the “store of techniques” that “harmonize different interests, worldviews and remembered experiences” (Tschuggnall and Welzer 2002: 142) in family remembering as a communicative process. Gyulnaz resorts to different techniques however. She brings up the topic of her marriage to a Bulgarian in various ways, most notably stating her own independence: I am generally quite rebellious. First, marrying a Bulgarian. That was quite a blow to my family. And even bringing him home to live with me… The others can’t accept that. They believe it’s pure impudence. … We, Scorpios, even if we eat ourselves, we get reborn (ibid.: 91). Referring to her Zodiac sign is Gyulnaz’s “communicative solution” (Welzer, Moller and Tschuggnall 2003: 32). It suggests that her behaviour was the result of her character’s predisposition, for which she could not assume responsibility. Thus family memory cannot be viewed as a monolith, but rather as a process of negotiation where each family member takes a position in relation to the symbolic patrimony of the family and the normative patterns ensuing from it. The two women’s narratives indeed present their family “less as a group of specialised functions than a group of differentiated persons” (Halbwachs 1952: 121). The issue of ethnicity comes to the fore – uniquely for Gyulnaz – in one more important situation when she refused “to be manipulated” during the namechanging campaign (discussed below). Thus Gyulnaz has experienced her ethnicity not only through her family (both positively and negatively), but also politically (only negatively). It is as a member of her family that she recollects her marriage, whereas the forced name change is experienced as a member of her ethnic group. The dynamics of belonging to these communities can be captured in terms of generation.8

8

For another case of combining family and generational perspectives, see Koleva 2009.

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G ENERATIONAL P ERSPECTIVES : L INKING M EMORY AND H ISTORY The concept of generation is used both to designate successive positions in the family and to refer to positions in society defined by specific values, orientations and attitudes of age groups to the respective historical periods. The most influential conceptualisation of societal generations belongs to Karl Mannheim who, in his now classic study, argued that generations were not age groups or cohorts, but rather a “particular kind of identity of location” (Mannheim 1952: 292) formed by shared experiences. The identity of social location [Lagerung], i.e. the objective structural situation, was a prerequisite for the collective cohesion of a generation. But the “actuality of a generation” was achieved by the “participation in the common destiny of this historical and social unit” (ibid.: 303)9, that is, the collective organisation of experience. Thus, a generation is characterised not only by temporal simultaneity but also by shared orientations. The third level of cohesion is the so-called “generational unit,” a group of people belonging to a generation who work up their common experiences in specific ways and develop common means of coping with their generational “destiny”. A particular generation usually consists of a number of units based on different reactions to the same social circumstances. The core ideas of this theory that are particularly important for the discussion of the case at hand are, first, the importance of the historical situation, and second, the importance of the stage of life at which individuals are exposed to that situation. Mannheim has argued that youth, the formative years of one’s life, is the period of the formation of the “natural view of the world” that may or may not lead to the actuality of a generation. He and his followers stress the importance of a formative event, which is likely to be a traumatic event or a catastrophe that “uniquely cuts off a generation from its past and separates it from the future” (Edmunds & Turner 2002: 12). This theory is crucial at this point in the discussion because it enables us to link family time and historical time – and therefore family memory and social memory – by linking generations in the family to societal generations. Naturally, the two women in our case have experienced very different “formative events”, making them part of the respective societal generations. Nadya’s formative years fall in the period of early socialism characterised by considerable social mobility (downward for the former affluent classes and upward for many members of Nadya’s generation). The focus of Nadya’s free narrative is on her teens and early twenties (roughly, the 1950s) when she enjoyed a

9

Italics in the original.

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degree of freedom unthinkable for village girls at the time (esp. Turkish girls), together with her brother’s support (with his help, she became the first girl to act in an amateur play), her parents’ trust (they let her study in town alone), and her peers’ and superiors’ respect: Later on, from the District Committee (I was the most popular girl in the village) some people came and asked me to organise a Turkish girls’ society in the village. But what could I do? … So, I started with some of my good friends. I gathered a lot of girls for the Socialist Youth then. Some girls did not want to join. But there was this magazine, Nov Hayat, Yeni Hayat, a Turkish magazine that published embroidery models. So I organised these courses for the girls and the other girls joined too, because of the embroidery. … Later on, in the District Committee, when they said: “You go to this and that village,” you had to go. Assemblies, meetings, conferences… You get a cart or a sleigh at the inn and get to the village. If there is no cart or sleigh, you have to walk. … We got together every evening with the village boys and girls. We got together in the evening to talk. And I let the girls walk in the front, and then the boys after them, and I walked at the tail. I was more scared than they were, but I was the leader… (Daskalova 2004: 73-74). Never in her talk are these activities viewed from the perspective of political activism; it is not clear if she ever became a member of the communist party. Rather, this was for her a way to self-fulfilment, a breakthrough, a fascination with the moment of empowerment and, in the context of the interview, a way of self-presentation. Nadya talks about her religious activities for the past 20 years in very much the same way: not in terms of religious devotion but as an achievement of hers and recognition by the others. She presents herself less like a believer and more like an expert whose competence was appreciated and whose services were sought. Gyulnaz’s youth coincided with the period of late socialism when social mobility was much more difficult and her chances for self-fulfilment were quite unclear. Her generation, however, reached its “actuality” and grew into an ethnically defined “generation unit” because of a unique traumatic event: the forced changing of Turkish names in early 1985 and the repression against Turks that accompanied and followed it. This is another circumstance that makes her ethnicity more salient and cognitively available for her than for her mother. She was brave enough to oppose it, and though her opposition was only a refusal to fully comply, she tells of this moment as an example of her capability to make decisions on her own and stand up for them:

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Another moment like this was when our names were forcefully changed. The Party Secretary called me then and said I should make a speech, because I was a good public speaker. And I told him that I didn’t want to be manipulated. “I’ve been manipulated enough.” And he went: “No, no, it’s your personal decision what to say.” And I said no. And in those years that was quite scary. God forbid that anyone might have to live through something like that. One evening they came and they arrested my father and my brother, just like that, without giving a reason. And we did not know where they took them. And yet – now I can’t imagine how I could have had this kind of spirit – I said I would not speak… (ibid.: 91) Like her mother above, Gyulnaz is interweaving her personal experiences with collective ones, with her narrative oscillating between the immediacy of individual experience and references common for all contemporaries. Again, like her mother, she is not expressing an active political position here, but is rather making a statement about herself as a person. This becomes clear in her next sentence where she uses the same communicative solution as above: I am a Scorpio, and even if I were to break my head, I would only do what I decided. I have made plenty of decisions like this. (R.R.: All of them related to the renaming?) Yes, more or less. Now there is nothing to be rebellious about. But I always stand up for my rights (ibid.: 91). Though Gyulnaz tells about herself and her personal experiences, her story is part of the shared narrative of her ethnic group. By reproducing it, albeit with variations, individual experiences are linked with collective ones and individual life is related to history.

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I NTERWOVEN M EMORIES 10 No doubt family memories, even the most intimate ones, are “entrenched in a collective imaginary shaped by public, generational structures of fantasy and projection and by a shared archive of stories and images that inflect the transmission of individual and familial remembrance” (Hirsch 2008: 114). The forced name change and the repression in the 1980s are traumatic events that could serve as an anchor for a common Bulgarian Turk intergenerational memory, as in the “shared archive” referred to by Marianne Hirsch. The Mahmudovs’ case, however, seems to suggest that the situation is more complex. While this is a key episode for the daughter, the mother hardly ever mentions it (only en passant, reasoning that her husband would have had more trouble in that time had he been an intellectual rather than a craftsman). Generally, Bulgarian Turks from Nadya’s generation tend to be ambivalent about the socialist period. While they did suffer repression in the mid-1980s, they also had experiences which they now appreciate highly: job security and security of income, a moderate living standard, lower criminality rates, etc. In addition, many of them, like Nadya, experienced upward social mobility in their youth. This generational “shared archive” based on positive identification with the past, does affect their memories of socialism. Some of them are clearly nostalgic about the recent past. In idealising the past in their accounts, they often tend to downplay the forced assimilation campaign. It doesn’t seem to be very important for the youngest (third) generation either. Recent interviewing in Northeast Bulgaria has shown that for them, the forced name change is not a central topos of memory. As a rule, this topic only comes up if introduced by the interviewers. A woman born in the mid-1980s reports that her parents and grandparents do not talk about it. She is not even sure what exactly happened:

10 In this section, I rely on preliminary results of the research project “Integration and Tensions in Mixed-Population Regions in Bulgaria and Neighbouring Countries”, part of the FP6 international project MICROCON (Micro-level Analysis of Violent Conflict). Its aim was to explore the pertinence of ethnicity and religion for the selfidentity of people in these regions, as well as the values and attitudes, which can enhance tolerance and integration or, conversely, be a source of differentiations, mutual exclusion, opposition and conflict. The data collecting method included narrative interviews with both Turks and Bulgarians. Fieldwork in Northeast Bulgaria was conducted in 2008-2009 by Dr. Teodora Karamelska and a team of interviewers.

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I couldn’t make out anything of that affair. I have no such memories, I don’t know, I didn’t feel so depressed to have a Bulgarian name. You are a Muslim inside, you are a Turk, a name alone doesn’t impede, it doesn’t change anything. … I also used to have a Bulgarian name, so… nothing changed eventually, they were not told to change their religion but just their names and what did our people here do – nothing, what happened when they changed the Muslims’ names – what did they gain? I don’t know, I was too young. Nothing, a big nothing.11 This case relates to Welzer’s argument that Nazi crimes and the Holocaust do not play a significant role in the family memory of contemporary Germans (Welzer et al. 2002). What is of special interest here is that the interviewee comes from a family that has suffered injustice, not from one of bystanders. Such a problematic handing down of ‘history’ between generations in the family could be interpreted as a way of negotiating the minority status of the family. However, another young woman claims to “remember” the assimilation campaign, and her “remembrance” testifies to a different type of mnemonic socialisation: I remember it [the forced changing of Muslim names] too, I remember it too though I was 3-4 years old, and if I start talking about what happened to my family, to my family and my kin, I will probably make you cry – something that can never be forgotten and nevertheless (emphatically) I have nothing against anybody because that was politics, some political mistake. It is true that there were many agents of that party [the Bulgarian communist party], people who used to get their friends into hot water and whatnot, but nobody has a right to be cross with anybody; that was a vicious system that no longer exists, why should you live with it, this is just nonsense.12 Prompted by the interviewer, she tells about her mother’s and her aunt’s experience, and the story of a man she has heard about who was interned; she adds that there are “a number of stories about our acquaintances, because we have shared with each other after all, this is a mark on a person’s life, especially on our parents’ lives”. Obviously, this is a case of cultivating a “postmemory” (Hirsch) by 11 Interview by Teodora Karamelska, 15 May 2008, Razgrad. Archive of MICROCON project 6, “Integration and tensions in mixed population regions in Bulgaria and neighbouring countries”. 12 Interview by Teodora Karamelska, 10 May 2009, Targovishte. Archive of MICROCON project 6, “Integration and tensions in mixed population regions in Bulgaria and neighbouring countries”.

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way of transgenerational sharing in the family. The younger generation acquires not only access to the stories (to the so-called episodic memory) but also clues to interpreting them, i.e. access to shared meanings (the so-called semantic memory). It is the latter that is at play in the quotation above, offering a consensual judgement and a positive way of “feeling ethnic” (forgiving past injustice) rather than an immediate reminiscence. Thus it seems that family memory does not always retain traumatic moments that are not shared publicly and that contribute to the cohesion of the family as a mnemonic community. On the contrary, personal narratives about the traumatic event seem to draw from consensual public ones. While in the 1990s interviewees most often preferred to avoid the theme of the “revival process” (which might suggest that the unforgivable has to be forgotten in order to move forward), in 2003 and 2008-09 there seemed to be no communicative crisis. One of the reasons might be that all the interviews I have examined are with women who tend to be less outspoken on public events than men. Furthermore, the very experience of the assimilation was gendered: men were the ones who were arrested, sometimes interned or otherwise repressed because resistance was expected mostly from them. However, the more important reason for the absence of trauma in family and ethnic memory is, in my opinion, the fact that it has been worked through in public remembering (albeit not shared by all groups of contemporary Bulgarian society) by various (mostly symbolic) forms of transitional justice. As early as the winter of 1989-1990, Turks who wished to restore their Muslim names were free to do so and most of them did. They regained the right to practice their religion, speak their language and study it at school on an optional basis. The documents of the Politburo of the Communist Party related to the assimilation campaign were published. Legal proceedings were instigated against the perpetrators, though no one was sentenced. A political party with a predominantly Turkish membership was established at the start of the democratic changes and has been represented in the Parliament ever since (part of the coalition in power at the time the interviews were recorded). While this form of representation sustained the politicisation of ethnicity that had started with the assimilation efforts of the communist regime, it also offered access to local and central power. In terms of economic participation, some Bulgarian Turks have benefited from their transnational extended families and/or from temporary labour migration to Turkey. In spite of a recent rise of Bulgarian ethnic nationalism, these new ethnic options have made it possible for individuals and families to work past humiliation into an acceptable narrative by re-schematising it and giving it new meanings.

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Adding the third generation to the picture, i.e. persons born just before or during the assimilation campaign who do not have their own memories of it, reveals another dimension of the mutual influences and the interweaving of family memory, ethnic memory and generational memory. For them, ethnicity now seems to be intermittent, less central, sometimes salient but relying on selective ethnic symbols and presumably having fairly little impact on their social status (while Gyulnaz still considers her ethnic origin to be the reason for not being admitted to the university). The ways they experience their ethnicity have been the result of a different configuration of powers and interests. While interviews with this generation do not give much access to memory as habitus, they reveal the development of ideologies of belonging where generational values interfere with family values. Going back to the questions raised at the beginning of this chapter, it seems justified to conclude that due to its social nature and its dynamic character, family memory is not immune to other types of social memory. It is shaped by them in the processes of everyday communication between family members belonging to overlapping and intersecting mnemonic communities. In spite of a certain tendency towards individualism (partly exemplified by Gyulnaz), family has not lost its importance as both a social group and a mnemonic community, especially in the case of minorities whose stock of social and cultural resources is relatively limited. That is why it seems that the personal effects of past events can have potential public consequences in the present, precisely through such mundane varieties of communicative memory. Rather than revealing a clear pattern, the Mahmudovs case, together with the more recent examples, points to the complexity of the mediations between self and society, as well as to the interpersonal agency organising local life worlds around communication and negotiation. Thereby, the axes of group differentiation that coincide with contests over memory can sometimes test and reconfirm the family as community with traditions of its own, as Halbwachs has assumed, while in other cases they can build on diverse perceptions of the past and its effects on the present, thereby extending obligations to loyalty and solidarity outside the immediate community of family and kin. In the latter cases, membership in communities that are primarily based on discourse (such as generational and ethnic/national ones) can become more meaningful for the individual than membership in communities based primarily on physical proximity (such as families and neighbourhoods). While this conclusion seems to qualify Halbwachs’s emphasis on solidarity in regard to family memory, it does confirm his insistence on the social nature of collective memory. Insofar as its social production is concerned, collective memory depends on the social forces of the present. However, it is itself one of these forces

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insofar as it contributes to the social production of collective identities, attitudes and positions.

R EFERENCES Assmann, Jan (2001): Kulturnata Pamet: Pismenost, Pamet I Politicheska Identichnost V Rannite Visokorazviti Kulturi [Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und Politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen] Sofia:Planeta 3. – (1995): Collective Memory and Cultural Identity. New German Critique 65: 125-133. Daskalova, Krassimira (Ed.) (2004): Voices of Their Own. Oral History Interviews of Women. Sofia: Polis Publishers. Edmunds, June & Bryan S. Turner (2002): Generations, Culture and Society. Buckingham: Open University Press. Favart-Jardon, Evelyne (2002): Women’s ‘Family Speech’. A Trigenerational Study of Family Memory. Current Sociology 50(2): 309-319. Halbwachs, Maurice (1980[1950]): The Collective Memory. New York: Harper & Row. – (1952[1925]): Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France (Online Publication). Hareven, Tamara (1982): Family Time and Industrial Time. The Relationship Between the Family and Work in a New England Industrial Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hirsch, Marianne (2008): The Generation of Postmemory. Poetics Today 29(1): 103-128. Koleva, Daniela (2009): Daughters’ Stories. Family Memory and Generational Amnesia. The Oral History Review 36 (2): 188-206. Komulainen, Katri (2003): Constructions of Nation, Family and Gender. Collective Narratives of War By Evacuated Karelians. Ethnicities 3(1): 59-83. Mannheim, Karl (1952[1928]): The Problem of Generations. Oxford University Press. Olick, Jeffrey K. & Joyce Robbins (1998): Social Memory Studies. From Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices. Annual Review of Sociology 24: 105-140. Pamporov, Alexei (2009): Socialni Distantsii I Etnicheski Stereotipi Za Maltsinstvata V Bulgaria [Social Distances and Ethnic Stereotypes of the Minorities in Bulgaria]. Sofia: Open Society Institute.

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Tschuggnall, Karoline & Harald Welzer (2002): Rewriting Memories: Family Recollections of the National Socialist Past in Germany. Culture & Psychology 8(1): 130-145. Welzer, Harald, Sabine Moller & Karoline Tschuggnall (2002): “Opa war kein Nazi. Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis”. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer Wertsch, James V. (2002): Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zerubavel, Eviatar (1997): Social Mindscapes. An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard University Press. http://Www.Uqac.Uquebec.Ca/Zone30/Classiques_Des_Sciences_Sociales/ Index.Html

“Actually we are Deeply Rooted in Austria” National Identity Constructions and Historical Perceptions of Young People with Migration Backgrounds in Austria1 A LENA P FOSER

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Due to the European integration process and the consequences of globalisation for European societies, questions concerning memory politics and the interpretation of history have gained momentum in many European countries. One reason for this are migration movements which cause a growing pluralisation of societies. They have led to a “juxtaposition and intertwining of multiple relationships, perceptions and practices” (Strasser 2009: 9) and also have an effect on the historical consciousness of the population. In immigration countries, new historical experiences and narratives are added to national master narratives and consequently interact with them as well as contest them. Migrants bring their own stories with them – stories about migration and biographical memories, as well as historical narratives from the societies of their origin that are often nationally or ethnically framed. It is an important political question whether these memories are marginalised and considered to be dividing or whether they are articu-

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This article arose in the context of the research project “Interkulturelle Spurensuche. SchülerInnen forschen Migrationsgeschichte(n)” (Intercultural Tracking. Pupils do Research into Migration History/ies) at the Democracy Centre in Vienna and was made possible by the financial support of the Austrian Ministry of Science and Research within the program Sparkling Science (SPA/01/2007 -84/A) (2008-2010). I would like to thank Christiane Hintermann and Elisabeth Röhrlich for the stimulating discussions during the project.

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lated as a shared memory which creates connections among members of a society (Motte & Ohliger 2004: 47). The sociologist Viola Georgi has warned that if only the history of the nation-state is laid as a foundation for the collective, this can serve as a further mechanism for the exclusion of migrants from the majority society (Georgi 2006: 356). In the past years, the issues of migration and memory have started to be discussed among historians, social scientists and pedagogues alike: How is the history of migration remembered in the national histories of different countries? How are migration and migrants represented in museums, the media and textbooks? How should history be taught in classes where a large percentage of the pupils have a “different” ethnic and religious background? Especially in culturally heterogeneous school classes teachers face the question of how to deal with diversity on a practical level, and since the 1990s “intercultural didactics” has become a keyword – at least in the German debate. However, despite these recent discussions and the obvious heterogenisation of the population, many European countries’ self-perceptions persist in being framed in national terms. Studies that deal with the public representation of migrants in Austria, Germany and France show that migration history plays a marginal role in collective memory and that despite the factual social importance of migration and the lived memory of migration, migrants and their stories are often marginalized in public discourses (Hintermann 2009, Motte & Ohliger 2004, Noriel 1995). Austria, for example, has a large share of migrant population and was also historically shaped by migrations: in the 19th and early 20th century, the city of Vienna in particular attracted immigrants coming from Bohemia and Moravia, Galicia and Bukovina. Since the late 1960s, migration history has been shaped by economically motivated immigration and more recently, a general diversification of the migrant population has occurred. Currently, 15% of the Austrian population was born abroad and almost 18% has a “migration background” (1st and 2nd generation immigrants). For the city of Vienna the number is even higher: according to recent statistical surveys every third person is either an immigrant or has foreign parents (Statistik Austria 2010:20). Despite the rich and multifaceted history of migration and the currently high percentage of migrants, migration hasn’t shaped the national self-understanding. Austria continues to be a “reluctant immigration country”, as the migration researcher Christiane Hintermann points out. According to Hintermann “non-representation (of migration and migrants) has been the prevalent model” in Austria (Hintermann 2009: 13, Bauböck & Perchinig 2006). Migration history and migration issues in general do not play an important role in the curricula and in textbooks, and na-

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tional narratives persist to be central to the symbolic construction of belonging in Austria. This article is concerned with one aspect of the study of migration and memory: the question of how young people with migration backgrounds engage with established national narratives which they are told about in school and in the media: How do they perceive and appropriate these narratives, and how is this related to their identity constructions? The importance of representations of history for creating, maintaining and changing social identity is a given among scholars of social memory (Liu & Hilton 2005, Gillis 1994). Maurice Halbwachs, whose work laid down the foundation for memory studies, assumed that “collective memory” reflects the identity of a social group and ensures solidarity and continuity among its members (Halbwachs 1985). While Halbwachs has been criticised for his functionalist approach to memory and his “vision of frozen social identity” (Misztal 2003: 55), newer works have instead emphasised the dynamics of memories and identities; “…both identity and memory, we now recognize, are ongoing processes, not possessions or properties” (Olick & Robbins 1998: 133-4). There are many studies on the historical perceptions and identity constructions of young people which build upon these theoretical frameworks2, but it is only recently that studies have started to ask how people with family histories and collective narratives that differ from those of the majority population relate to those narratives that are considered to have a foundational character for a nation-state (Georgi 2003, Fechler et al. 2000). My article is divided into two parts: In the first, a theoretical framework for analysing the historical perceptions of young people with migration backgrounds based on literature on historical consciousness and migration studies will be presented. The second part is a case study of a young migrant which has been chosen from a sample of 23 qualitative, semi-structured interviews with pupils in three Austrian schools. This case study aims to provide insight into the complex nexus of historical perceptions and national identity constructions within the context of migration. It shows how young people can switch between historical narratives and reference groups in order to construct multiple belongings. Furthermore, it makes it clear that experiences of discrimination and exclusion influence the way they appropriate historical narratives and construct their identities. Consequently, the analysis of young migrants’ historical perceptions must take into account the sociopolitical context in which they are located; namely,

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In Germany, the memory of National Socialism and the Holocaust, in particular, has been the object of numerous research projects (for example, Welzer 2007, Welzer et al. 2002, Leonhard 2002).

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where young migrants (even of the “second” and “third generation”) still represent the national “other”. In the conclusion I will discuss the results of the case study in a broader context and compare it to other young people’s narratives.

T HEORETICAL F RAMEWORK Historical consciousness – shaped by different contexts It is one of the main insights of early sociological and psychological studies on memory (Halbwachs 1985, Bartlett 1932) that memory is a socially shaped reconstructive process and involves an active engagement with the past within a present framework. Individuals engage with the past and make it meaningful in the context of present-day preoccupations and depending on their position in social space. According to Jeismann, historical consciousness integrates past, present and future and puts them together into one context of meaning (Jeismann 1985). Historical consciousness is not identical with historical knowledge but is closely related to people’s identity. Matching the historical truth to people’s knowledge is therefore of less interest for studies on historical consciousness than the social and cultural processes of how people appropriate and make sense of history. While Halbwachs’ functionalist approach to memory didn’t pay much attention to processes of transmission (for a critique, see Connerton 1989: 39), newer research on historical consciousness (Welzer et al. 2002, Inowlocki 2000, Leonhard 2000) has analysed the processes for the effect social contexts – the family, the educational system and the media – have on the way the past is transmitted, perceived and appropriated. They illustrate that multiple social frameworks, communities and institutions shape people’s engagement with the past, including the content and forms of how people speak about it. Many studies put an emphasis on the role of the family in the shaping of historical perceptions: As the central institution for socialisation, the family has a special influence on the self-development of children and how they perceive the world and also history (Inowlocki 2000). Long before children and young people study history at school, they already have impressions and images concerning the meaning of certain historical periods for older family members. Memories which are transmitted within families are usually connected to lived experiences of “significant others” and create – despite the differences between the individual members’ perceptions – a feeling of cohesion and continuity. However, to a large extent, the transmission of collective memories in modern societies is also

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shaped by specialised institutions like schools, museums and the media, which can be located on the side of the “cultural memory” (Assmann 1992). In the school and also the mass media, young people are confronted with cultural “objectivations” of the past. Interpretations of historical events are not only shaped during history lessons, but also in other subjects like literature, geography and arts. In large part, it is the history of the nation-state that is represented there: “Schools and textbooks are important vehicles through which societies transmit the idealized past and promote ideas of a national identity and unity” (Misztal 2003: 20). There are different opinions about the influence that the family, schools and media have on young people’s historical perceptions and about the role of the individual personality. Studies like the one by Harald Welzer and his colleagues on the transmission of memories of National Socialism in German families (Welzer et al. 2002) indicate that despite the social differentiation and the growing influence of the media, the family is still crucial for shaping political attitudes as well as perceptions of history. In families, historical perceptions are more emotionally shaped than those transmitted in school, which instead have a higher degree of abstraction and institutionalisation. Of course, historical representations which are shaped by different contexts can interact and intermingle with each other, but they can also be contradictory: family conversations provide different interpretative frames than the school and leave a deep impression on the historical consciousness. Concerning the memory of National Socialism, there is a sharp difference between official memorial culture and private memory in Germany; transmitted memories about grandparents’ personal experiences during this time usually do not match up to the historical knowledge acquired in school. Despite the knowledge that young people have about the crimes of National Socialism and the Holocaust in Germany, they still tend to represent their relatives as heroes and victims, not as followers or perpetrators (Welzer et al. 2002). Historical perceptions of young people with migration backgrounds For a long time in migration research, the life-worlds of young people with migration backgrounds have been characterized as being shaped by “problems” and “deficits”. Young migrants are supposed to grow up “between two cultures”, the culture of the immigration country and the country of origin, and are therefore confronted with conflicting values and expectations. Hämmig, for example, supposes that the different demands of the primary and secondary socialisation – of

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family and school – can lead to a “crucial test” (Zerreißprobe) for young people (Hämmig 2000: 50). Young people with migration backgrounds seem to be uprooted, disoriented between the cultures, or in some cases to be still bound by their parents’ norms and values. In the past two decades, migration research has undergone a significant change. Most scholars recognize that many migrants and their descendants maintain a variety of ties to their home countries, while simultaneously being incorporated into the countries where they live (Levitt & Jaworsky 2007). Influenced by post-structuralism, post-colonial studies and cultural sociology, migration scholars have criticised simplistic conceptions of culture and identity that underlie much of the past migration research. In their eyes, cultures should not be conceptualised as coherent and homogeneous entities based on a fixed set of norms, values and beliefs that can be clearly localised and ascribed to certain people. “Cultural overlaps” (Reckwitz 2001) and “transnational social spaces” (Glick Schiller et al. 1995) which are not limited to one nationstate are characteristic for the life-worlds of migrants and for our increasingly globalised world in general. According to Reckwitz, it is necessary to openly define “culture”: first, cultural phenomena must be regarded as fluid and inconsistent. Second, it should not assume that the boundaries of a culture are identical with group boundaries, that is to say that culture is bound by pre-fixed communities (Reckwitz 2001). For example, those actors that are part of migration movements are particularly confronted with “cultural overlaps” that influence the formation of identities on both individual and collective levels. Due to such “cultural overlaps”, different interpretations of situations are possible depending on which of the cultural codes are used. Moreover, Homi Bhabha’s concept of “hybridity” or “hybrid identities” (Bhabha 1994), which was developed in the context of post-colonial theory, points out that people have individualized ways of dealing with different cultural codes and belongings. Identifications of people with migration background do not have to be problematic, but can combine elements of multiple cultural contexts and redefine them. Regarding young people’s historical perceptions, it is important to note that young migrants as well as “autochthonous” young people generally belong to different social circles (Simmel 1908) and have different resources at their disposal for narrating the past. However, although “autochthonous” young people have to come to terms with competing narratives as well, as a rule, people with migration backgrounds are exposed to a greater variety of historical narratives and, in general, of meaning patterns. In migration research, young people with migration backgrounds seem to belong to different social worlds to an even greater extent than their parents. They attend school in the receiving country,

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they belong to ethnically mixed peer-groups and are exposed to diverse media coverage (Oswald 2007: 137). In regard to their historical perceptions, young people with migration backgrounds are also confronted with different contexts in which often conflicting narratives are transmitted. In school and the national media, they are primarily taught the national history of the country in which they live which is still important for constructing national identities. Migration histories and histories of the country of origin are often not supported by social institutions and tend to lose their value (Apitzsch 1999). Against this background, the family usually has the role of transmitting the cultural heritage as well as the historical narratives of their own ethnic or national group to the next generation. According to the sociologist Bernhard Nauck (Nauck 2002), intergenerational transmission is often the only possible way to transmit the cultural heritage of the society of origin. Paradoxically, in the migration context, the family members simultaneously experience greater difficulties and greater need for intergenerational transmission. On the one hand, parents often lose their function as role models in the receiving society; on the other hand, some parents make an even greater attempt to transmit their cultural values etc. to the children, especially if they are not supported by cultural institutions (schools or nurseries). The transmission of the cultural heritage is therefore of even greater importance in migrant families. However, this does not lead to the assumption that these families are “hotbeds of backwardness”, in which “pre-modern” values and orientations of the country of origin are transmitted – like the public discourse on migrants often supposes. Lena Inowlocki stresses that “knowledge about one’s origin” (Herkunftswissen) and the family’s migration history can be a positive cultural resource for young migrants because they often encompass positive “impulses of modernisation, autonomy and emancipation” (Inowlocki 2000: 71). Elements of the history of the country of origin can be used to interpret one’s own situation and therefore have the potential to stimulate reflection. How do young people with migration backgrounds appropriate history under these circumstances? Following Viola Georgi, three different scenarios can be imagined for the development of young migrants’ historical consciousness (Georgi 2003): the appropriation of national narratives of the immigration country, the orientation towards the national narratives of the (parents’) country of origin, and a “hybridisation of historical consciousness”. In the first case, young people with migration backgrounds adopt the collective memory of the majority society and make it part of their own story. Their historical perceptions are orientated towards the majority society and are largely shaped by the majority society’s school and mass media. In its extreme form, one can call this type “assimila-

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tion”. A second option is the orientation towards historical narratives of the country of origin or of one’s own ethnic or religious group. To explain, the specific ethnic or cultural background has the main impact on the formation of the historical consciousness, with “ethnic closure” being the extreme case. In the third scenario, a hybridisation of the historical consciousness takes place. In other words, the people’s historical consciousness consists of elements of multiple collective narratives. Following the theoretical approaches outlined above as well as newer empirical studies (Weiss 2007) in migration research, I assume that the hybridisation of identities is the rule in the migration context: Young people with migration backgrounds do not have to choose between Austrian narratives and those of their parents’ countries of origin. Their historical consciousness consists of diverse collective and biographical memory resources. “Hybrid historical consciousness” can thus be used to describe the individualized processing of different historical resources. It can thereby subsume different phenomena: the juxtaposition of different narratives that are not interconnected and refer to different periods or events, the intermingling of different narratives when talking about the same subject as well as the reference to a shared transnational history.

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How do young people with migration backgrounds narrate and appropriate central events from Austrian history, and how is this related to their identity constructions? Asking young migrants about their perceptions of National Socialism, the declaration of the state treaty, EU accession and other events which they consider to be crucial to national history, requires first asking them about knowledge that they were acquired in school. However, in the process of making these events meaningful, young people not only apply this knowledge, but evaluate it in the context of personal experiences, values and orientations, using different interpretation frames to do so. Between November 2008 and January 2009, we conducted open and semistructured interviews with young people with and without migration backgrounds in three Austrian schools. In these interviews, young people spoke about their perception of Austrian national narratives and were given space to narrate about themselves, their interests and their family backgrounds. When considering the link between historical perceptions and constructions of belonging, it is important to note that narrations about history are, of course, only one way of positioning oneself and of constructing belonging. The ability to recall stories

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about nationally important historical events and to evaluate them requires certain competences in dealing with transmitted histories. In many interviews, young people used multiple reference groups and comparisons crossing national borders when making sense of historical narratives. However, not all young people were able to do so – this concerns people with and without migration background alike. The case of David3, which I will analyse in more detail below, is especially interesting because of his multiple historical references and the intermingling of different perspectives within one narrative. David was born in Vienna as the son of Bosnian Serbs. At the time of the interview, David was 19 years old and one of the most active pupils in his class. David has a strong interest in history – both in the family history as well as in the history of Yugoslavia and Austria. David’s family migration history, narrated at the beginning of the interview, reaches back to the grandparents’ generation who came as labour migrants from Yugoslavia (now: Bosnia and Herzegovina) to Austria. David’s grandfather was the first to migrate to Austria in the beginning of the 1970s to work as a construction worker. While he initially planned to stay only for a short time, “little by little” he changed his principal residence to Austria. His wife and his son – David’s father, who was seven years old at that time – moved there a year after his arrival. However, the decision about where the family would live in the future was not definitive at that point. The financial advantages and the family’s higher standard of living in Austria conflicted with the emotional attachment to the place of origin. Both David’s grandparents and his parents had strong “social and symbolic ties” (Faist 2004) to their place of origin: they often visited their village where parts of the extended family were living and the family still owns a house there. Moreover, David’s father chose a partner from Bosnia and Herzegovina and took her with him to Austria. Only in the mid-1990s – more than twenty years after the grandfather’s migration to Austria – did David’s family give up the idea of returning. The beginning of the war in Yugoslavia, the lack of options after the war and the birth of the second son were finally decisive and David’s family decided to acquire Austrian citizenship. Nevertheless, the family’s transnational ties persist to this day. Especially after the grandparents’ return to Bosnia and Herzegovina after the war and the beginning of the renovation of the family’s house, David’s family has been going back and forth between Austria and Bosnia and Herzegovina regularly. The family’s border-crossing social and symbolic ties are therefore still important in the “third generation” of migrants – for the 19-year-old David who has

3

The name was changed to guarantee anonymity.

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grown up in Vienna. Especially during his childhood, David went with his parents to Bosnia and Herzegovina regularly. For a long period of time, David thought of “returning” there to open his own business. Despite the dense, crossborder networks to the place of origin, David evaluates the narration of his family history by referring to Austria. D: Yes actually we are deeply rooted in Austria anyway. Yes, for example the territory where we have our house today this used to be – back then during the times of the monarchy, this was the territory of the AustrianHungarian monarchy and for example, I only recently got to know that the brother of my great-great-grandfather is buried on the Zentralfriedhof (the central cemetery) in Vienna, because back them he was a soldier for the imperial-royal monarchy in the First World War. And actually I am surprised – / I: This is very interesting/ D: because he actually fought against the kingdom of Serbia, although we are Serbs (he laughs). Having told about his grandparents and parents’ extended migration story and the family’s continuous connection to Bosnia and Herzegovina, David’s evaluation that his family is “deeply rooted in Austria” is, in the first instance, surprising: It seems that he feels a need to justify the family’s presence in Austria.4 David goes back to the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and uses it as a means to construct continuity in his family history and to root the family in Austria. He inscribes his family history into the multinational history of the Habsburg monarchy, which formed a common space in which nations lived together. Through the Treaty of Berlin, Austria-Hungary obtained the occupation and administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1878 onwards. It was formally annexed to the Empire in 1908 and remained so until 1918.5 However, for David it is not easy to judge the annexation: “Austria had the role of the occupants and we were the afflicted”, he says later in the interview. From the Bosnian perspective, the occupation was an expression of “Habsburg’s colonialism” and economic exploitation. According to narratives of Bosnian victimhood, social and economic progress was impeded through bureaucracy

4

This might be also related to the interviewer who is herself born in Austria and repre-

5

According to Glenny (Glenny 1999), the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina was

sents the majority society. supposed to prove to the world that the ailing Austria-Hungarian Empire was still a great power.

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and taxation, and people’s rights as citizens were restricted during Habsburg rule (Aleksov 2007:203-4). While traces of this argumentation can be found in David’s narrative, he stresses the positive sides of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire for Bosnia and Herzegovina at the same time, mainly through the construction of a railroad network which is still used to this day. David supports the (Austrian) view of the Empire’s positive role for the province as he concludes that “the monarchy had more advantages than disadvantages”. David’s evaluation of his relative, the brother of his great-great-grandfather whom he uses to make a direct connection between his family and Vienna, is also ambivalent. From a Serbian national perspective it seems suspicious to have fought on the side of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in the Great War. As David states, “actually I am surprised because he fought against the kingdom of Serbia, although we are Serbs.” And later: “I was wondering how he could do this. Probably he had to do it, otherwise they would have shot him.” But despite these ambivalences, the Austrian narrative is predominant in the interview. This is clearly linked to the symbolic advantages that David gains through the reference to a (positive) common history of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Austria: David uses this historical narrative to construct belonging in the present – the fact that a relative fought on the side of the Austrian-Hungarian army as well as the present location of the family’s house on the former imperial territory help to create continuity in the family history and to explain the migration to Austria. When he found out about the brother of his great-greatgrandfather during a random conversation about family history, David immediately told his classmates about it: “I was boasting a bit. Hey look! I am not a foreigner (Ausländer).” The relative’s grave at Vienna’s main cemetery, which is an important topos for Austrian identity, serves David as proof of his “Austrianness”. David’s narrative has to be considered against the background of his experiences of discrimination and exclusion in Austria. In the public discourse, migrants and their descendants are often perceived as being uprooted and without a history (Glick-Schiller et al. 1995): they do not belong to the nation-state to which they have migrated nor are they still an integral part of their country of origin. Moreover, David experiences discrimination in his everyday life: Although he belongs to the “third generation” of migrants in his family – his grandfather was the first to migrate to Austria – he is still labelled a “foreigner” by his classmates. To inscribe his family into Austrian history can be regarded as a strategic reaction to discourses which construct migrants as the “other” of the nation-state. In his narrative, David counters images of “uprooted migrants” who

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do not belong by referring to the remote common history between Austria and Bosnia and Herzegovina during Austrian-Hungarian imperial rule. Depending on the context, David positions himself as either Serbian or Austrian. While in his narrative these socially constructed categories of “Austrianness” and “Serbianness” are perceived as objectified cultural and religious differences and offer established frames for positioning oneself, he moves between them and employs them reflexively and relationally depending on the situation. He says that he is proud to be a “Serb” and positions himself as a practising member of the Orthodox Church, when being asked if his “background” matters for him, he argues that he has “a lot of Austrian culture” because he celebrates Christmas according to the “Austrian (Catholic) tradition”. Being confronted with discriminatory remarks from his classmates, he counters that he is an “Austrian thoroughbred” (Vollblutösterreicher). The possibility of navigating between identity categories and in this way negotiating his belonging in a multilocal life-world has to be understood as a specific cultural competence which is characteristic for many young people with migration background. For David, his knowledge about history is one cultural resource which he uses to construct belonging – in the context of his own family history when it comes to evaluating the occupation and annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the AustroHungarian Empire and also in David’s evaluation of Austrian neutrality. For David, the signing of the State Treaty and the declaration of neutrality in 1955 are the most important events in Austrian history. In this regard, David’s attitudes do not differ from other young people and those of the Austrian population as a whole. In opinion surveys, the declaration of Austrian neutrality is repeatedly called the most important event in Austrian history by people of all age cohorts (cf. Surveys of Fessl-GfK, quoted by Hintermann 2007: 493). The Declaration of Neutrality was adopted on October 26, 1955 as part of the constitution and declared Austria to be permanently neutral. While it was the immediate consequence of the allied occupation of Austria by Soviet, French, British and US troops after WWII and not a self-chosen status6 in the course of the post-war history the Declaration of Neutrality soon became closely connected to Austrian national identity and the idea of national sovereignty. Together with the State Treaty, which was signed in May 1955 by the allied powers and the Austrian government, it is considered to be the “birth certificate” of a stable Austrian nation (Liebhart & Pribersky 2004). Recently, in debates on Austria’s membership in the EU, the principle of neutrality has been intensely dis-

6

Without it the Soviet Union would not have agreed to sign the State Treaty of Austria which re-established the country’s independence.

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cussed in the public (Wodak et al. 1999): for example, regarding the question of whether Austria would be ready to participate in an EU Rapid Reaction Force. In particular, the far-right Freedom Party in Austria has used the neutrality in its anti-EU-rhetoric. The neutrality is a sign of national sovereignty and connected to Austria’s post-war history of success for David as well: D: I think it’s good that the Austrians declared the neutrality. 7 Since then things have been looking up. At least until now, because now everything has gone downhill again. For a few reasons. Yes. I: For what reasons? D: Well, the EU and generally. We wanted to get rid of the occupants, and in 55 we got rid of them with the treaty and in 1995 the same again. We are governed by others (3) I don’t understand this. David appropriates the Austrian master narrative of the successful reconstruction of Austria after 1955 and the “real” liberation of Austria in 1955 after the allied troops had left the country. The allied troops are regarded as occupants from this perspective. Only after Austria had regained her sovereignty could the country successfully develop. David interprets Austria’s accession to the EU as a continuation of a foreign dominance which contradicts national interests. In the same way as the narration about his family history, the narrative of neutrality gives him the opportunity to position himself as a “true Austrian” who defends the country’s interests and who opposes the “domination of the European Union”. This is one of the few paragraphs in the interview where David speaks of himself as part of an Austrian national “we”: “We wanted to get rid of occupants”, “we are governed by others”. David’s appropriation of the myth of the “successful reconstruction” of Austria after 1955 and the anti-EU-narrative can be regarded as an attempt to construct belonging by adopting an Austrian perspective. It offers him the possibility of positioning himself as part of an Austrian national “we” which is contrasted by the “politicians in Brussels” and to explain what he thinks to be best for the country. At the same time, his narrative also reflects biographical insecurities. David feels insecure about his future and doesn’t know whether he will find work in Austria. His fears about an uncertain future lead him to make exclusive claims: He argues for closing Austria’s national borders and re-establishing national sovereignty, by leaving the EU if necessary.

7

The original German expression was “… dass sie das g´macht haben, die Österreicher mit der Neutralität“.

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But David does not only take on the position of a defender of Austria’s national interest, but also justifies the neutrality from a Serbian perspective. He criticises the deployment of NATO soldiers in Bosnia and Herzegovina. David uses the neutrality strategically to denounce NATO’s deployment. In his eyes, the NATO troops did not fulfil their supposed peace-keeping function – they were only watching. D: Why should one risk the neutrality of a state, only so that it can participate in crisis deployment. NATO was of no use in the Balkans during the war. They couldn’t interfere and really, I don’t know why they were there at all, the Blue Berets (peacekeeping troops). They didn’t help anyone. (…) They were just there; they didn’t do anything, just watched. While David doesn’t add new dimensions to the narrative on neutrality – he deploys the frames of national sovereignty and security – it is interesting that he speaks about it from different perspectives: he uses it to defend Austrian national interests as well as from a Serbian perspective to criticize the deployment of NATO soldiers in Bosnia. David’s case shows how people with a migration background find strategic ways of positioning themselves and constructing belonging. He uses different cultural codes as well as historical narratives to position himself as an Austrian and a Bosnian Serb at the same time. In her study on how young people with migration backgrounds perceive National Socialism and the Holocaust, Viola Georgi has reconstructed a typology of biographical strategies to deal with the past which is based on the identification with historical and social reference groups (Georgi 2003). She identifies four reference groups in the interviews with young migrants in Germany: victims, perpetrators, one’s own ethnic group, and humanity. Similarly to Georgi’s study, our interviews show that there is a deterministic relationship between ethnic belonging and historical perception and that young people with migration backgrounds can use the national “majority society” as a reference group. They also indicate that young people can also switch between different reference groups in order to construct belonging. While in David’s interview the different frames do not contradict each other in the case of the Austria neutrality (David supports the neutrality both from an Austrian and a Serbian perspective), in the case of the evaluation of the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina – which touches upon national narratives in Austria and Bosnia and Herzegovina – we encounter conflicting memories which exist parallel to each other.

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C ONCLUSION Narrating history/ies is an essential part of positioning oneself and constructing one’s identity. Representations of national history offer definitions of “who people are” by referring to the past and linking it with the present and future (Liu & Hilton 2005). This paper has attempted to demonstrate that young migrants have an active role in dealing with historical narratives and that their historical consciousness is influenced by different sources which can be strategically used to construct belonging. In addition to identity being based on memory, that which is remembered is based on people’s identifications (Gillis 1994: 3). When talking about the past, young people like David make multiple framings and use different historical and social reference groups. These framings reflect their multiperspectivity and ambivalences in their identifications. Young migrants refer to their family history and historical narratives which stem from their own ethnic or national group, but at the same time they can use “Austrian narratives” to position themselves as part of the national “we”. A conceptualisation of identities as ongoing processes allows us to capture different ways of positioning oneself and to ask in which situations young people make use of which frames and reference groups. Young people can also refer to them strategically depending on the interaction with others: It is likely that when talking to his grandfather about his relative who fought against the Kingdom of Serbia (in David’s eyes, against his own ethnic group), he will evaluate the history differently than in front of his classmates (where he has to prove his “Austrianness”). While reflecting upon the agency of young people with migration backgrounds, the narrations should also be regarded as ways of claiming recognition for their multi-local life-worlds in a certain sociocultural environment (Scheibelhofer 2008: 196). There are many young people with migration backgrounds in our sample who have appropriated some central myths from Austria’s history: they support the Austrian neutrality as a symbol of the country’s sovereignty, regard the withdrawal of the Allies that liberated Austria in 1945 as the real “liberation” of the country and, like one adolescent in the sample, even adopt the position that Austria was Hitler’s first victim – a myth that has eroded since the Waldheim Affair in 1986 and is no longer taught in school. This reproduction of national myths shows the power of national narratives that persist in people’s minds and continue to be transmitted throughout the sociocultural environment of young people, even after they have been questioned by historians and the general public (like the myth of being Hitler’s first victim). Despite young people’s active role in referring to multiple narratives while telling their stories, it is necessary to take into account that immigrants and their descendants have a

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marginal, “peripheral” position in the national collective memory, and that the adoption of these narratives can be a way to construct belonging. In the public discourse, migrants remain underrepresented and, even when they are integrated into the education system and the labour market, they are not symbolically included in the national self-image. Experiences of discrimination and exclusion can influence the way young people appropriate historical narratives and construct their identities. The adoption of national myths and of national “outgroups” (like the Allies of WWII and the EU) enables them to construct themselves as part of the national “we” and to defend the country’s interests. It expresses a desire to belong to the national collective which generally does not regard migrants and their descendants as full members of society. However, the adoption of particularistic national narratives and myths is only one way in which young people with migration backgrounds narrate Austrian history and deal with misrecognition. In contrast to the particularistic versions of national narratives presented in the case study (to construct belonging to Austria and one’s own ethnic group), universalistic positions can also be found among young people with migration backgrounds. Our interviewees made such universalistic references when they condemned Nazi crimes, referred to human rights transcending the nation-state and also interpreted the neutrality as a pacifistic principle. Securing peace and fighting discrimination are important values for many young people; for some of them, their evaluation of historical narratives is also connected to their own or transmitted experiences of war, violence and discrimination. In the context of the fragmentation of national memory resulting from the diversity of cultures, traditions and religions within states, ethnic and national groups may still provide an important frame for making sense of the past and claiming belonging. However, at the same time, the pluralisation of memory can also lead to a denationalisation.

R EFERENCES Aleksov, Bojan (2007): Habsburg’s “Colonial Experiment” in Bosnia and Hercegovina revisited. In: Brunnbauer, Ulf, Andreas Helmedach & Stefan Troebst (Hg.): Schnittstellen. Gesellschaft, Nation, Konflikt und Erinnerung in Südosteuropa. München: Oldenbourg; pp. 201-216. Apitzsch, Ursula (Hg.) (1999): Migration und Traditionsbildung. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.

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Assmann, Jan (1992): Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. München: Beck. Bartlett, Frederick (1932): Remembering. A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994): The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bauböck, Rainer & Bernhard Perchinig (2006): Migrations- und Integrationspolitik. In: Dachs, Herbert (Hg.): Politik in Österreich. Das Handbuch. Wien: Manz; pp. 726-42. Faist, Thomas (2004): The Border-Crossing Expansion of Social Space. Concepts, Questions and Topics. In: Faist, Thomas & Eyüp Özveren (Eds.): Transnational Social Spaces. Agents, Networks and Institutions. Aldershot: Ashgate; pp. 1-36. Connerton, Paul (1989): How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fechler, Bernd, Gottfried Kößler & Till Lieberz-Groß (Hg.) (2000): “Erziehung nach Auschwitz” in der multikulturellen Gesellschaft. Pädagogische und soziologische Annäherungen. Weinheim: Juventa. Georgi, Viola (2006): Historisch-politische Bildung in der deutschen Migrationsgesellschaft. Zwischen nationaler Gedächtnisbildung und demokratischer Erinnerungsarbeit. Internationale Schulbuchforschung 4(28): 355-366. – (2003): Entliehene Erinnerung. Geschichtsbilder junger Migranten in Deutschland. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition. Gillis, John R. (1994): Introduction. Memory and Identity. In: Gillis, John R. (Ed.): Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press; pp. 3-26. Glenny, Misha (1999): The Balkans. Nationalism, War, and the Great Power, 1804-1999. London: Granta Books. Glick-Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch & Cristina Szanton-Blanc (1995): From Immigrant to Transmigrant. Theorizing Transnational Migration. Anthropological Quarterly 1: 48-63. Halbwachs, Maurice (1985): Das Gedächtnis und seine sozialen Bedingungen. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Hämmig, Oliver (2000): Zwischen zwei Kulturen. Spannungen, Konflikte und ihre Bewältigung bei der zweiten Ausländergeneration. Opladen: Leske+ Budrich. Hintermann, Christiane (2009): Migration and Memory in Austria. Representations of Migration in a Reluctant Immigration Country. FJEM 4(2): 4-16.

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– (2007) Geschichtsbewusstsein und Identitätskonstruktionen in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft. Eine empirische Analyse unter Jugendlichen in Wien. SWS-Rundschau 47(4): 477-499. Inowlocki, Lena (2000): Aus Familiengeschichte lernen? Zur Bedeutung und Geltung von “Herkunftswissen” bei rechtsextremen Jugendlichen und Kindern von Arbeitsimmigranten. Zwei Fallstudien. In: Fechler, Bernd, Gottfried Kößler & Till Lieberz-Groß (Hg.): “Erziehung nach Auschwitz” in der multikulturellen Gesellschaft. Pädagogische und soziologische Annäherungen. Weinheim/München: Juventa; pp. 67-86. Jeismann, Karl-Ernst (1985): Geschichtsdidaktik und Forschungskommunikation. In: Behre, Göran & Lars-Arne Norborg (Hg.): Geschichtsdidaktik, Geschichtswissenschaft, Gesellschaft. Stockholm: Schwedisches Universitätsund Hochschulamt; pp. 35-62. Leonhard, Nina (2002): Politik- und Geschichtsbewusstsein im Wandel. Die politische Bedeutung der nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit im Verlauf von drei Generationen in Ost- und Westdeutschland. Münster: Lit. Levitt, Peggy & B. Nadya Jaworsky (2007): Transnational Migration Studies. Past Developments and Future Trends. Annual Review of Sociology 33: 12956. Liebhart, Karin & Andreas Pribersky (2004): Die Mythisierung des Neubeginns. Staatsvertrag und Neutralität. In: Brix, Emil, Ernst Bruckmüller & Hannes Stekl (Hg.): Memoria Austriae I. Menschen – Mythen – Zeiten. Wien, Oldenburg: Böhlau; pp. 392-417. Liu, James H. & Dennis J. Hilton (2005): How the past weighs on the present: Social representations of history and their role in identity politic. British Journal of Social Psychology 44: 537-566. Misztal, Barbara A. (2003): Theories of Social Remembering. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Motte, Jan & Rainer Ohliger (2004): Einwanderung – Geschichte – Anerkennung. Auf den Spuren geteilter Erinnerungen. In: Motte, Jan & Rainer Ohliger (Hg.): Geschiche und Gedächtnis in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft. Migration zwischen historischer Rekonstruktion und Erinnerungspolitik. Essen: Klartext; pp. 17-49. Nauck, Bernhard (2002): Solidarpotenziale von Migrantenfamilien. Bonn: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. http://library.fes.de/fulltext/asfo/01389toc.htm (accessed Sept 30, 2010). Noriel, Gérard (1995): Immigration: Amnesia and Memory. French Historical Studies 19 (2): 367-380.

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Olick, Jeffrey K. & Joyce Robbins (1998): Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices. Annual Review of Sociology 24: 105-140. Oswald, Ingrid (2007): Migrationssoziologie. Konstanz: UVK. Reckwitz, Andreas (2001): Multikulturalismustheorien und der Kulturbegriff: Vom Homogenitätsmodell zum Modell kultureller Interferenzen. Berliner Journal für Soziologie 11 (2): 179-200. Simmel, Georg (1908): Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Scheibelhofer, Paul (2008): Ehre und Männlichkeit bei jungen türkischen Migranten. In: Baur, Nina & Jens Luedtke (Hg.): Die soziale Konstruktion von Männlichkeit. Hegemoniale und marginalisierte Männlichkeiten in Deutschland. Opladen: Budrich; pp. 183-199. Statistik Austria (2010): Migration und Integration. Zahlen, Daten, Indikatoren. Wien: Statistik Austria. Strasser, Sabine (2009): Bewegte Zugehörigkeiten. Nationale Spannungen, transnationale Praktiken und transversale Politik. Wien: Turia+Kant. Weiss, Hilde (2007): Wege zur Integration? Theoretischer Rahmen und Konzepte der empirischen Untersuchung. In: Weiss, Hilde (Hg.): Leben in zwei Welten. Zur sozialen Integration ausländischer Jugendlicher der zweiten Generation. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften; pp. 13-32. Welzer, Harald (Hg.) (2007): Der Krieg der Erinnerung. Holocaust, Kollaboration und Widerstand im europäischen Gedächtnis. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. Welzer, Harald, Sabine Moller & Karoline Tschuggnall (2002): “Opa war kein Nazi“. Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. Wodak, Ruth et al. (1999): The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Narrated (Hi)Stories in an Intercultural Context How Young People in Germany and Poland Deal with Tensions Between Communicative and Cultural Memory J EANETTE H OFFMANN

Narrated “history” and narrated “stories”: this play on words in the title highlights the narrative connection that exists – not only in an etymological sense – between individual stories and history as a story (Assmann 2001: 118). My contribution focuses on “narrated (hi)stories” in the sense of linguistically structured and narratively transmitted memories. It is mainly from these stories – besides other sources such as images and places (Assmann 2003) – that adolescents develop their historical consciousness, and hence their awareness of the Second World War, Nazism, German Occupation, and the Holocaust. Young people’s historical consciousness, understood as a complex interplay of interpretation of the past, understanding of the present, and a perspective on the future (Jeismann 1997), is primarily shaped by narratives in social and media contexts. Social and cultural science research has revealed that remembrance practices in Poland and Germany differ both in the areas of “cultural memory” (Assmann 1992) and “communicative memory” (Welzer 2005). As yet unresearched is the way in which adolescents deal with (hi)stories in different lingua-cultural and institutional contexts. ): Presented below are selected findings from my doctoral thesis (Hoffmann 2011) within the framework of which I conducted a four-part empirical study on discussions about a contemporary historical novel in classrooms in Germany and Poland and their contribution to processes of historical and anthropological meaning construction. First, I shall outline the theoretical background and the research design of my study. I shall then present the results of the analysis of focused interviews with secondary school students about their knowledge

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of German-Polish history during the Nazi period. And finally, I shall provide an outlook from a literature didactics perspective.

T HEORETICAL B ACKGROUND : C OMMUNICATIVE AND C ULTURAL M EMORY The theory of “social memory” as formulated by Maurice Halbwachs (1985), constitutes the theoretical background to my study. According to Halbwachs, memory is invariably a social construct. Jan and Aleida Assmann further refined Halbwachs’ theory by distinguishing between two memory frameworks: “communicative memory”, for example in the family, and “cultural memory”, for example in school or in public. Harald Welzer, in particular, has developed a theoretical model of “communicative memory” from a social-psychological perspective (2005), which he has empirically investigated in a European context (2010; Welzer et al. 2005). Communicative family memory, which is narratively structured, is where everyday remembrance takes place. These narrations form cultural frameworks of meaning construction. They serve as a guide for children and adolescents, helping them to classify their experiences and develop an identity. In the course of the socialisation process, as the individual’s scope of action increases, cultural memory gains in importance. In their cultural science studies, Jan and Aleida Assmann, in particular, have dedicated themselves to investigating the forms of “cultural memory” (J. Assmann 1992, A. Assmann 2003). Compared to communicative memory, cultural memory is characterised by a greater degree of structure and organisation (Assmann 1988: 13 et seq.). This is reflected in discussions in the classroom. ): In the debate on the mother-tongue didactics of German, literature is frequently viewed from a cultural-historical perspective as a “medium of memory”.1 Hence, literature lessons are anthropologically justified and legitimised (Müller-Michaels 1997). With Hopster (1994), I augment the anthropological justification of literature classes with an historical perspective, and I also include an intercultural perspective, following Wintersteiner (2006). Against the background of these theoretical reflections, I locate the reception of contemporary historical youth literature in classroom discussions about literature (Wieler 1998) between the two frameworks of social memory. To illustrate this transitional function, I have added “memory in classroom discussions about

1

For example, Erlinger 1999, Bogdal 2005, Abraham & Kepser 2005.

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literature” to a tabular overview provided by Assmann and Assmann (1994: 120) (see middle column). My study was based on the assumption that the students read the historical story, told in a contemporary historical youth novel, both against the background of their family memory and the public memory negotiated in the classroom.

Table 1: Discussions about literature between communicative and cultural memory communicative memory

content

historical experiences within the framework of individual biographies

forms

informal, relatively unstructured, natural, constituted in interaction with others

codes, storage

temporal structure bearers

everyday life vivid recollection in organic memories, experiences and hearsay 80-100 years, temporal horizon of 3–4 generations that shifts in direct relation to the passing of time non-specific, eyewitnesses of a community of remembrance

memory in classroom discussions about literature individual, contemporary, and historical experiences outside the biographical context institutionalised, medium degree of formation, exemplary communication

cultural memory

everyday lessons current and historical experiences in organic memories symbolically expressed in literature absolute past, contemporary history and the present

festival concrete objectivations, traditional symbolic coding/ enactment in texts, images, dance etc. absolute past in mythical prehistory

teachers as specialised bearers of tradition and students and nonspecific readers

specialised bearers of tradition

mythical prehistory, events in the absolute past ordained, high degree of formation, ceremonial communication

R ESEARCH D ESIGN – THE Q UALITATIVE E MPIRICAL D ESIGN OF THE S TUDY The field of research for this study is comprised of three learning groups: a 9th grade class at the German School in Warsaw, a 10th grade class at a Berlin Gymnasium (grammar school)2, and a first-grade class at a Warsaw liceum

2

All text within square brackets has been added by the translator for clarity.

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(grammar school), which is the equivalent of 10th grade in Germany. The students are aged between 14 and 17. All the classes are lingua-culturally heterogeneous; some students have personal experience of migration. 3 The contemporary historical novel chosen for my study was read and discussed in German class (all the German teachers hail from Germany). At the Warsaw liceum, it was also dealt with by Polish teachers in geography and history lessons. The novel I chose was Mirjam Pressler’s Malka Mai (2001)4. It was nominated for the German Children’s Literature Award, and was awarded the German Book Prize and the children’s book prize of the city of Zurich La Vache qui lit. Malka tells the story of a Jewish family who flees without preparation from Poland to Hungary in 1943 in order to escape deportation by German troops. It is narrated from the alternating perspectives of the mother and her seven-year-old daughter Malka.5 The interdisciplinary thrust of my study calls for a multiperspectival methodological approach. On the one hand, I conducted semi-structured focused group interviews and individual interviews (Hopf 2003); on the other hand, I videotaped the lessons and carried out participant observation (Krummheuer & Naujok 1999). From the transcribed data (Selting et al. 1998) I analysed selected “key incidents” in the ethnographic tradition (Kroon & Sturm 2007).

Table 2 Approaches

Data Types

historicalpolitical

Student interviews

Classroom discussion

1) narrated (hi)stories

2) historical-political contextualisation

Cultural Context

in Germany in Poland

literaryanthropological

3) subjective reception

4) communication about the novel

in the inter-cultural context

The starting point of my investigation was the question of whether the youth novel Malka is read differently by secondary school students in Germany and Poland. Both the interview data and discussions during lessons revealed two

3

See also Gogolin & Krüger-Potratz 2006.

4

English translation Malka (2002).

5

Davideit & Hoffmann (2004) provide a comprehensive aesthetic and didactical analysis of the novel.

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different ways of approaching the novel: first from a historical-political perspective and second from a literary-anthropological one. On the basis of the multicultural research field, the two data types, and the two ways of approaching the novel, I opened up the following horizons of comparison which are illustrated in table 2. This yielded the four parts of the study conducted within the framework of my doctoral thesis:

• Narrated (hi)stories in Germany and in Poland • Historical-political contextualisation of the reading of the novel in the classroom

• Subjective reception of the novel on the part of the students • Communication about the novel in the classroom. In the following I shall present by way of example the findings of the first part of my study – “Narrated (hi)stories in Germany and in Poland” – because they are of particular relevance to the subject of this collective volume “Peripheral Memories”.

N ARRATED (H I )S TORIES IN G ERMANY R ESULTS OF THE ANALYSIS

AND IN

P OLAND :

The aim of this part of my study was to reconstruct historical meaning construction on the part of young people in Poland and in Germany on the basis of the stories with which they are familiar and their interpretation of these stories. During the interviews conducted with the students, I asked them about their knowledge of German-Polish history during the Nazi period. The purpose of my questions was to find out what historical knowledge the students had acquired; where they had acquired it; to what extent the stories transmitted in the various contexts differ; whether they consider that the topic is still of relevance today; and in what situations they encounter it in their daily lives. Four narrative presentations of history can be inductively reconstructed from the interview data:

• • • •

stories heard in the family stories read (seen or heard) in literature and the media stories learnt at school stories experienced “on the street”.

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While the stories in the first and last categories take place within the framework of communicative memory, the two middle categories must be assigned mainly to cultural memory. Stories presented in literature and the media are of great importance insofar as they facilitate transitions between the two frameworks of memory. By depicting experiences in text and images, these stories themselves represent a transition from communicative to cultural memory; on the other hand, because they are, in a sense, “dissolved” during the reading (listening, or viewing) process and the subsequent discussions, they also represent a transition from cultural to communicative memory. On the whole, the young people interviewed in Poland and Germany perceive the presence of the historical events of the Second World War in their everyday lives today. Be it in literature classes or history lessons, in the newspapers, on television, or in literature itself: “You’re constantly reminded of it, actually.” as one female student in Warsaw put it. However, in all four spheres, different stories are told in Poland and in Germany, and these stories are also interpreted differently by the young people. I shall illustrate this on the basis of the four forms of presentation of history in stories. (Hi)stories heard in the family As a rule, the young interviewees in Germany and Poland first encounter stories about the Second World War in their families. From the point of view of narrative perspective and discussion partners, the family narratives in both countries are similar. However, they differ with respect to the patterns of interpretation within communicative memory and the relative importance accorded to communicative memory in comparison to cultural memory. What almost all of the family narratives both in Germany6 and in Poland have in common is the fact that they are told as victim stories 7:

6

See also Welzer 2005b.

7

In the following transcripts, the names of the students and teachers have been anonymised. The transcription conventions are oriented towards the transcription system for conversation analysis GAT (Selting et al. 1998: 31 et seq.): [ = overlapping utterances; (-) / (--) / (---) = short pauses of up to one second; (1.0) = pauses in seconds; because=it’s = slurring; : / :: / ::: = prolongation; MOther = emphasis; ((clears his throat)) = (nonverbal) actions; = para-verbal actions, (interpretative) comments; (heard) = presumed wording; ((…)) = omissions; I = interviewer. This transcription system employs only lower case and forgoes the use of punctuation

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Germany Thorsten: My grandad (-) he was just navy in those days (-) and well he he doesn’t know ( ) yes he doesn’t really remember exactly ( ) but just that there was bombardment from the sea for days on end and stuff (-) and well that (-) that always sounds pretty bad Poland Sybilla:

My granny (-) also died in the war (-) because of a Hitler bomb and well that’s also pretty sad

When perpetrator stories involving family members are recounted the students in both countries take great pains to distance themselves from them: Germany Rosalie:

My German grandad (-) I find it but I believe he is=a bit (-) National Socialist so to speak (-) and oh I (-) I don’t hate him but well good ((laughs)) (-) anyway (-) and I no longer have any contact with my grandparents now

Poland Susanna: My grandad always tells me at Christmas time or at celebrations or whatever about the Jews how he annoyed them et cetera ((laughs)) but nothing concrete but such a terrible opinion The Holocaust is not a topic in the family narratives in Germany or in Poland. In the case of the young people with a Polish family background, a paradox situation arises, which manifests itself, for example, when anti-Semitically motivated acts by grandparents are spontaneously recounted during discussions following stories of grandparents’ suffering in concentration camps. For example, the above utterance by Susanna was made just after the following statement by Halina: Poland Halina:

My grandfather was also in a concentration camp during the war and (-) my family my grandparents and so on ((...))

marks. To enhance the readability of the translation, question marks have been included in square brackets and upper case has been used for proper nouns.

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The communication situations in both countries are similar insofar as the young people tend more to talk to their parents about wartime in general rather than the grandparents’ telling about their personal experiences during this time: Germany I: Benno: Lewis: I: Lewis:

Poland Halina:

Have you ever talked about it with your grandparents who were perhaps alive at the time [?] Nah [I talked to my grandm [em how they experienced it personally [?] I haven’t talked to my grandmother about it (-) my (-) nor with my grandfather actually

(-) at home well (-) when I’m at home with my parents (-) then they answer but with grandparents it’s well I mean my grandparents avoid this subject like when I ask like then they answer but can you see that they don’t do it so directly

However, different patterns of explanation for this reticence on the part of grandparents can be identified in the young people’s utterances. In the case of grandparents in Poland, it is attributed to their “not wanting to remember” because of the painful memories, whereas in Germany it is ascribed to their “not being able to remember”, which is more likely to be an indication of repression: Poland Lucjan:

Germany Anne: I: Anne:

My great-grandad in other words the father of my grandmother on my mother’s side well he was taken to a concentration camp and there em (-) like killed actually like and em my grandmother she doesn’t (-) well (-) want to talk about it she doesn’t like the subject

My grandad (-) like (-) also talks about it sometimes What does he tell you or what do you talk about then [?] Well (-) em (-) he can’t rea::lly remember it so well (-) in those days and he wasn’t really DIrectly affected

On the whole, in the light of the many stories told during the interviews, family memory would appear to be of much greater importance in Poland than in Germany, where the family narratives are not recounted in public and where family

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discussions are sometimes triggered only by cultural memory negotiated in school: Poland Lucjan: Germany Benno:

But at home I do talk about it rather a lot

Yes em that was when my brother was younger he well what do I mean by younger well one or two years ago he did it in school really intensively and he talked about it with my parents and I was there well (and we also talked a bit about it like)

These findings concur with those of cross-national transmission research, according to which it is not as easy to integrate family narratives into the grand national narrative in Germany as it is in other European countries (cf. Welzer 2010). (Hi)stories read (seen or heard) in literature and the media The young interviewees in Poland and Germany also mention stories in literature and the media about wartime as sources of their historical perceptions. Differences – both formal and content-related – exist between the individual media and the reception contexts. The students in Poland mention mainly historical novels or stories by Polish authors about various wars. These include, for example, two works by Henryk Sienkiewicz: Potop (The Great Flood) (1886), about the Polish-Swedish war in the 17th century, and Krzyżacy (The Crusaders) (1900), about the crusades of the Knights of the Teutonic Order. Both books are set in Poland. The works mentioned by the students are generally literary classics and most of them are embedded in the schools’ literary canons.8 However, contrary to the findings of social science research projects conducted in the 1990s (Jonda 1999), the interviewees do not associate the historical novels read in school with a negative image of Germany. To a certain extent, the books referred to by the students in Poland, especially literary classics on the subject of the German occupation and the Holocaust, such as works by Hanna Krall or about Janusz Korczak, oscillate between literary and documentary modes. Occasionally, contemporary historical novels are read for leisure: 8

See also Meyer 2008: 74.

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Ela:

I: Ela:

Yes well I still remember Miriam but the surname I can’t remember it was in Germany and I in a Polish institute it was called Listy Milośći in other words Letters of Love and it is a Jewish woman who em (-) do you know it [?] em Maria Nurowska ((...)) It is about a woman who who also lives in the ghetto or hides or people hide her

In Germany, by contrast, besides classical literary texts from the Germanspeaking countries, such as the play Andorra by Max Frisch (1961), the young people also cite contemporary historical youth novels from an international context – mainly from Western countries. These works are usually recommended school reading, although the girls also read them for leisure. One example is Der Gelbe Vogel (The Yellow Bird) (1981) (English original Alan and Naomi (Levoy 1977)): Anne:

Then (-) I have another book something about a bird (-) called (-) I don’t remember the title exactly any more it’s em also about (-) about=a girl who (-) well em had to suffer because she was a Jew was completely distraught and then with=a fr made friends with a boy (-) and at the beginning didn’t talk at all and in the end well () romped around with him quite happily and then (-) somebody (-) hassles her some kind of em Nazi and then she is again (-) she has this memory again and she falls into this trance again and then she was really just a basket case (-) and the boy couldn’t save her

Compared to the past decade, there has been no change in the literary texts selected for young people in the school context in Germany. With works such as Damals war es Friedrich (Richter 1961) (English translation Friedrich (1968)) and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (Kerr 1971) (German translation Als Hitler das rosa Kaninchen stahl (1973)), they continue to come out of the remembrance discourse of the 1960s and 70s:9 Jessica: Jacek: Jessica:

9

It really started I think with at the time it was Friedrich we read it in eighth seventh eighth eighth grade

See also Runge 1997.

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In both countries, the young interviewees regard the reading of literary texts at school as “work” or “learning”: Germany I: Rosalie:

Poland Kasia: I: Kasia:

How come you know all that [?] Well you have em (-) in in primary school you learn you read we read Anne Frank

We only read like excerpts from books in class Ah yes Well worked on them and em for example something by Hanna Krall10

Film portrayals of a documentary or fictional nature are mentioned equally by young people in both countries. In Germany, the reception of these films is mainly embedded in classroom discourse, whereas in Poland it is embedded in the family context for the most part: Germany Rosalie: I: Rosalie:

Poland Ela: I: Ela:

There are also films about it (-) well (-) I know one it’s you know it’s that Italian film (-) My (-) Life (-) is beautiful (-) mm=hm it’s called and it was (-) Oscar nominated and (-) best film (-) sometime a really old one I think actually but in any case yes I saw it

(-) Anyway I remember where I saw the film my dad anyway I went to it with my class mm=hm and my father em (-) well and when I came home like from from the cinema we did talk about it a bit anyway he he knows quite a lot about history and stuff he told me a bit more anyway he always tells [me] things from some history (-)

Occasionally, the young interviewees in Poland observe, in the social debate, a national claim to a sole right of remembrance. This exclusive claim manifests

10 Hanna Krall’s literary reportage Zdążyć przed panem bogiem (1977) (English translation Shielding the Flame (1986)) is recommended reading for schools in Poland.

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itself, for example, in the choice of words when discussing international film productions such as The Pianist (Polański 2002) in Poland: Ela: I: Ela: I: Ela:

Also the fact that it wasn’t in Polish lots of people found that really bad mm=hm It’s in English because=it’s em because the actors like are not (-) Polish mm=hm and like on the internet I read that that’s just not possible

The students themselves adopt a transnational perspective in this regard: Ela:

Kasia:

That didn’t actually bother me that much after all Polanski is an international director and if he has actors who aren’t Poles then it’s natural (-) Who the actors are is actually not that important or what language they speak anyway the subject is what counts

(Hi)stories learnt in school With regard to history lessons, the young interviewees distinguish (hi)stories learnt in school about the Second World War with reference to the social or institutional context (school – family) on the one hand and the cultural context (Germany – Poland) on the other. Adolescents in both countries identify the differences between family narratives and school narratives along the lines of differentiation between communicative and cultural memory. In their view, family narratives are characterised by subjectivity, privateness, fragmentedness, and vagueness. School narratives, on the other hand, are deemed to be characterised by an objective, scientific, cohesive, and precise confrontation with the subject matter: Germany Anne:

Poland Sybilla: ((...))

I would think that in school (-) it’s more the historical background that is regarded more objectively whereas at home (-) you talk about your own opinion and I think well that (-) and that and I read that somewhere once

Yes because every story is different I think

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Yes but I had (-) for example feelings em because for example sometimes something is quite personal and here in school you talk about facts (-) facts facts facts

The young people in Germany assign particular importance to the cultural memory negotiated in school. It frequently serves as a primary source of their historical consciousness. By contrast, their counterparts in Poland tend to emphasise the communicative family memory: Germany Lewis:

Poland Michał:

Miss Schorfheide always includes a lot of historical stuff and the like she also has quite I presume because (-) she’s always telling us things that we usually

I think that you can’t always (-) express your opinion so openly like for example at home ((...)) if for example you say something different to what’s in the history book that could em ((clears his throat)) cause some problems at least I think so ((laughs))

From the perspective of the young people of Polish origin with school experience in Poland and Germany, history lessons in the two countries differ in that in Germany the focus is on Nazism and anti-Semitism (“I really had the feeling that they felt a need to talk about it a lot.”), whereas in Poland great importance is attached to coming to terms with the suffering experienced by the Poles. These students juxtapose a future-oriented approach geared towards teaching democracy in Germany with a backward-looking approach oriented towards teaching commemoration in Poland: Hugo:

In school (2.5) well it’s different I think because in Germany em the Second World War is explained differently than I think at any rate than here in Poland I’ve already em about that anyway I already from my anyway a friend of mine was in Germany (-) went to school there and also [experienced] something like that there (--) and I heard that there they well they em there they don’t say anything about that they are always repeating that it never again anyway that it em should never happen again (-) that it was a mistake and they start more with the dates with the

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facts (-) em here we em also mainly tell like (-) about dates facts but (-) em how should I say (3.0) also about the people about the the em (--) the cruelty the whole (-) anyway we are not ashamed of that and we tell ALL anyway if someone WANTS to know something em then they ask and (-) like and they also get an answer In contrast to the rather rational treatment of the war years in German history lessons, the students in the Polish history classroom perceive a more anthropological and narrative approach to contemporary history. In their view, a lot more personal stories are told in Polish schools11 and there are closer links between literature and history lessons. (Hi)stories experienced “on the street” In the (hi)stories experienced ‘on the street’, the young interviewees in Poland and Germany are confronted with the wartime past in different ways. Their perspectives differ with regard to the participating groups of persons, the accentuation of the time dimensions, and the way these time dimensions are linked. The young people of Polish origin observe that the Second World War has a strong influence on Polish-German and Polish-Jewish relations, especially for the eyewitness generation in Poland. They report both anti-Semitic and antiGerman remarks made in public. From a social-psychological perspective, there is reason to believe that some of these stories are actually family stories but that, out of loyalty to the family and in order to save face, they are relocated to the street with the goal of rendering them ‘tellable’: Karolina: Time and again you hear these remarks for example not from my granny but for example from the friend of my em my friend’s granny I: mm=hm Karolina: For example em really very often you hear remarks when there’s something on the radio or whatever that’s Jewish radio and by that she means I’ve no idea I don’t know what she means by that (-) she doesn’t like the the music for example By contrast, the young people in Germany consider that, nowadays, the Second World War has hardly any influence on German-Polish relations in everyday

11 See also Schmitt 1997.

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life: “We have nothing more to do with that period (somehow).” Nor can they imagine that the traces of the war are still ever-present for their counterparts in Poland: I: Lewis: I: Lewis:

I: Lewis: I: Lewis: I: Lewis:

I: Lewis:

My last question on German-Polish relations do you think that the Second World War still influences them [?] The Second World War German-Polish relations [?] Yes I don’t quite understand what you mean because the Second World War is anyway whether it the rel ( ) Yes yes the memory of it Ah I see That that it took place Well maybe for the And what happened there Maybe for the older people but I would say at my age (-) or say twenty-year-olds wouldn’t I think associate anything with it really I don’t know how the others see these Germans anyway of those who live in this country that could well be ( ) in the Second World War but (-) mm=hm But (-) well (-) I wouldn’t say that those of my age still of it anyway people should know that the Second World War took place and what happened during it but (-) it’s actually no longer that important because what happened happened

Although young people of German origin who migrated to Poland perceive these traces of the war in the form of resentments towards Germans, they cannot understand them and feel that they are unjustly regarded as ‘perpetrators’: Isolde:

I: Isolde:

I:

For example when we go on a trip with our class on a class trip or whatever by public transport we really notice that this em these prejudices all Germans are Nazis are still there especially among the old people but also among the younger ones passed on by the old people (-) mm=hm I mean em it is obvious that em many people many old people who experienced the war (-) em still have prejudices or even had bad experiences you can’t even deny it=of COURSE but I think it’s about time to overlook it well not overlook not forget it mm=hm

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Isolde:

But people should also recognise that now a new generation and that not all Germans are like that or were

The only point on which there is consensus between the young people in Poland and Germany is that the wartime past still tends to be of greater importance to the eyewitness generation – albeit to varying degrees in each country – than to the generations that followed: Germany Benno:

Poland Hugo:

Yes among the older generation for example (-) who were refugees (-) or who were sent to war they still have well these terrible memories (-) anyway many of them do I would say

I think em that (-) the people who show the most hatred those who experienced the whole thing who were in the middle of it and the war em also left its mark on them

However, this line of argument, pursued on a theoretical level by the students, contradicts their everyday experiences in Poland. They definitely observe warrelated resentments there on the part of children and young people vis-à-vis young people of German origin or young people of Polish origin who used to live in Germany. These resentments find their expression in xenophobic remarks with historical connotations: Kamil:

I: Kamil: I: Kamil: I: Kamil: I: Kamil: I: Kamil:

Sometimes people say things to you on the street when you speak German that well I dunno they shout Hitler or something like that after you (-) em actually it can be (-) quite hurtful Have you [already experienced it personally [?] [Yes I have already experienced it personally In what situation (-) was that[?] em (-) (Wolfgang)=a friend was speaking German on the street mm=hm and (-) [someone] shouted after him Who [?] Well some Pole I dunno mm=hm Young people in any case

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Occasionally, the young people in Poland explain these resentments with reference to inter-generational transmission within families, thereby establishing a connection between past experiences and their current actualisations: Kasia: Ela: Kasia: Ela: Kasia: I: Kasia: Ela: Kasia:

Yes especially because our grandparents well they experienced it mm=hm yes well (-) and a lot of evil well on the part of and that that always comes from the it is passed on the stories mm=hm are passed on from generation to generation mm=hm that there there is still a bit of anger or whatever

On the whole, the young people in Poland are better able to link different periods to each other because they are transmitted within the communicative family memory. By contrast, it can be observed that their counterparts in Germany tend to separate the past and the present more strictly: I: Benno: I: Benno:

Do you think then that the (-) Second World War still influences relations between the Germans and the Poles nowadays [?] (-) Nah I wouldn’t say so Why [?] Yes because it’s (-) a completely different generation (-) that we have we have nothing more to do with that period (somehow) that’s why (-)

For the students in Germany, the experiences of the eyewitness generation and the attitudes of that generation’s children and grandchildren generally exist side by side without any connection between them.

S UMMARY : H OW Y OUNG P EOPLE D EAL BETWEEN M EMORY F RAMEWORKS

WITH

T ENSIONS

Despite the differences revealed by the cultural juxtapositions undertaken here, the above findings confirm that there is no such thing as the Polish or the German remembrance practice. Rather, in the course of their lingua-cultural socialisation, the individual youngsters participate in a multitude of remembrance cultures. Tensions exist between the numerous and extremely heterogeneous narratives: the narratives in the family, in literature and the media, in school, and

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‘on the street’. Tensions which must be dealt with by the adolescents. They have to live with their family history; they must hold their own in discussions in school. They are challenged to cope with the tensions between communicative and cultural memory, between past and present, and between victim and perpetrator perspectives by establishing connections between them. Linking the communicative and cultural memory frameworks One key finding which emerged from the interviews is that the young people in both countries perceive contradictions between the communicative memory narratives and those of the cultural memory, as well as their respective interpretations. In their families, German and Polish adolescents have indeed encountered Nazi and anti-Semitic stories and patterns of interpretation from the GermanPolish(-Jewish) past – albeit only occasionally. They recognise a contradiction between these family narratives and those of cultural memory, for example in the context of lessons at school. There the condemnation of Nazi and anti-Semitic attitudes is ‘common sense’ (Geertz 1984), and great importance is attached to the commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust. However, the manner in which the young people deal with this tension differs in the two lingua-cultural contexts. The adolescents with a German family background greatly appreciate school history lessons and make every effort either to adapt their family narratives to the patterns of interpretation of the Nazi past that prevail in school, or they avoid a conflict between the family’s stories and the classroom discussions by keeping these stories to themselves. The young people in Poland do not handle the two frameworks of memory in a similarly clear-cut way. Rather, the interplay between the two is more ambiguous. In the family narratives, stories about the suffering of individual family members are abruptly followed by the telling of anti-Semitic accounts. Although the latter are recounted with explicit dissociation or are relocated to the street out of loyalty to the family, the young people are aware of them and also introduce them into the classroom discussion. Hence, in their efforts to form their own ideas about the Second World War period, the adolescents of Polish origin struggle more intensely with patterns of interpretation from both memory frameworks. Linking the past and the present A further difference between the ways in which young people in Germany and Poland deal with (hi)stories from communicative memory is the nature of the connection they establish between the past and the present. The youngsters of

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German origin generally perceive a clear distinction between past and present (“We have nothing more to do with that period (somehow).”) and cannot imagine that traces of the Second World War exist in everyday family and social life in Poland today. The adolescents with a German family background who migrated to Poland find themselves confronted in Polish society with the presence of experiences from the days of the German occupation. However, in view of the generational distance, they find it unjust that they are assigned to the perpetrator collective. By contrast, the young people of Polish origin perceive the suffering experienced by the eyewitness generation and can understand their embitterment, which they refer to plainly as ‘hatred’. Moreover, individual students attribute the (great-)grandchildren’s generation’s xenophobic attitudes towards Germans to the transmission of ‘stories from generation to generation’ within the framework of communicative memory. Linking the victim and perpetrator perspectives An overall view of the stories with which the young people in Germany and Poland are familiar and the way these stories are interpreted reveals the fundamental importance of literary narratives. The family stories are told mainly as victim stories. When dealing with the perpetrator perspective, the students either go to great lengths to dissociate themselves or relocate the stories ‘to the street’. By contrast, the literary narratives offer young people the shelter of fiction and freedom from obligations of loyalty to family members, thereby enabling them to approach the past from different perspectives and to experience its contradictions. As the interviews reveal, there is a gap in the communicative family memories in Germany and in Poland as far as the Jewish perspective and the suffering experienced by the Jews during the Holocaust are concerned. For the most part, adolescents’ knowledge of these stories stems from literature that is mainly read in school. Literary texts from the Jewish perspective of remembrance are canonically embedded in mother-tongue lessons both in Germany and in Poland. In this way, they are given an institutionally secured space in society in which they can be read and discussed. Although this store of literary knowledge and experience varies in Germany and Poland from a lingua-cultural perspective, it is equally present to the adolescents in both countries, who use it as a source for the development of historical consciousness.

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O UTLOOK The analysis triangulations used in the other parts of my study show that literature and discussions about literature in school make a significant contribution to the establishment of connections between communicative and cultural memory, the past and the present, and victim and perpetrator perspectives.12 This is due to the fact that literature offers patterns of interpretation that transcend family loyalty obligations and institutional claims to national identity formation. Integrated into literary discourse, these patterns of interpretation offer students alternative ways of approaching historical phenomena from a multitude of intercultural perspectives. Hence, literary texts and classroom discussions about literature are indispensable for socialisation during adolescence. However, they do not guarantee the development of students’ historical and anthropological consciousness. Ultimately, it is up to the adolescents themselves to deal with conflicts between different versions of historical stories. When so doing, they must decide for themselves what importance to accord to literary narratives. From a pedagogical perspective, and from the point of view of literature didactics, it is to be hoped that they consider these literary texts and discussions relevant and beneficial.

R EFERENCES Abraham, Ulf & Matthis Kepser (2005): Literaturdidaktik Deutsch. Eine Einführung. Berlin: Schmidt. Assmann, Aleida (2003): Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. München: Beck. – (2001): Wie wahr sind Erinnerungen. In: Welzer, Harald (Hg.): Das soziale Gedächtnis. Geschichte, Erinnerung, Tradierung. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition; pp. 103-122. Assmann, Aleida & Jan Assmann (1994): Das Gestern im Heute. Medien und soziales Gedächtnis. In: Merten, Klaus, Siegfried J. Schmidt & Siegfried Weischenberg (Hg.): Die Wirklichkeit der Medien. Eine Einführung in die Kommunikationswissenschaft. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften; pp. 114-140. Assmann, Jan (1992): Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. München: Beck.

12 See also Hoffmann 2008.

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Contributors

Elisabeth Boesen holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Bayreuth. She has done extensive fieldwork on nomadism and migration in West Africa. As a researcher she is currently working at Luxembourg University on social change, mobility and family memory in Luxembourg and the Greater Region with a special interest in transformation processes in the rural world. Her recent publications include: (co-edited with Fabienne Lentz) “Migration und Erinnerung. Konzepte und Methoden der Forschung / Migration et mémoire. Concepts et méthodes de recherche” (Münster: Lit Verlag 2010); (with Denis Scuto) “Historical testimony and social transformation. On memory processes in farmer and steel worker families”. Journal of Comparative Memory Studies 42(3) (2011); “Lebensplanung und Familiengeschick. Soziale Transformationsprozesse and familiäre Tradierung bei luxemburgischen Bauern”, in: Jens Kroh & Sophie Neuenkirch (Hg.): Erzählte Zukunft. Zur inter- und intragenerationellen Aushandlung von Erwartungen (Göttingen: Wallstein 2011). Elizabeth Carnegie is a faculty member at the University of Sheffield with particular responsibilities of arts and cultural management. She has considerable experience of the museums and galleries sector having worked as a curator of history with Glasgow Museums and participated in a number of high profile and award winning museum projects. She holds an MA Scottish Ethnology, University of Edinburgh, an MA Museum Studies, University of Leicester, and a PhD in Representation from the University of Edinburgh. She is Programme Director for MSc Creative and Cultural Industries. Her research interests include the representation of peoples, faiths and cultures with museums and she is currently researching representations of the Near East within nationally funded galleries and museums. Recent publications include: “Museums in Society or Society as a Museum? Museums, Culture and Consumption in the (Post)Modern World”, in: Daragh O’Reilly & Finola Kerrigan (Eds.): Arts Marketing: A Fresh Approach (London: Routledge 2010); “More an Emotion than a Country? Scot-

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tish Identity, Nationhood and the New World Diaspora”, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies 5(1) (2011). Delyth Edwards received an MA in Sociology from Essex University in 2006. During the following two years, she worked as a research assistant in the Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Glamorgan and simultaneously worked as a research assistant on a number of freelance projects in Cardiff. She is currently completing her doctoral research at Queen’s University in Belfast. Conference papers: “‘It was through some iron railing bars’: The effect of sibling separation in childcare history”, Scottish Institute of Residential Child Care and Child Care History Network’s, Glasgow, November 2011; “Sharing the Home: (Auto)biographical nostalgia of growing up in a children’s home”, British Sociological Association’s annual conference, London School of Economics, June 2011. Rita Garstenauer, PhD, studied History at the University of Vienna and the European University Institute, Florence. Since 2005 she is member of staff at the Institute of Rural History at St. Pölten and since 2009 lecturer at the University of Vienna. Her fields of expertise are agricultural history, autobiographical and narrative sources; statistical applications in history. Recent publications are: “Account Books, Amateur Literature and True Stories. The Practice of Rural Life Writing in 20th Century Austria”; in: Language and the Scientific Imagination: Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, 2008, Helsinki (2010); “Diskurs ohne Praxis? Landflucht und Abwanderung aus der Landarbeit (1920er bis 1960er Jahre)”, in: Rita Garstenauer, Erich Landsteiner & Ernst Langthaler (Hg.): Land-Arbeit. Arbeitsbeziehungen in ländlichen Gesellschaften Europas (Innsbruck: Studienverlag 2010); (co-edited with Günter Müller) “Aus der Mitte der Landschaft. Landschaftswahrnehmung in Selbstzeugnissen” (Innsbruck: Studienverlag 2011). Jeanette Hoffmann, PhD, studied German Language and Literature, Mathematics, Protestant Religious Education and Intercultural Education at the University of Münster (Germany) and worked as a cultural assistant in Opole (Poland) before joining the research staff in the department of education and psychology of the Free University of Berlin. Then she worked at a Montessori-oriented primary school in Berlin. At present she is lecturer at the Dresden University of Technology; during the winter semester 2012/13 she covers the chair for primary school pedagogy in Dresden. Her research focuses on children’s literature and its didactics, the empirical study of reading and classroom lessons, literary and media

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socialization as well as intercultural learning and multilingualism. Her publications include: “Literarische Gespräche im interkulturellen Kontext. Eine qualitativ-empirische Studie zur Rezeption eines zeitgeschichtlichen Jugendromans von Schülerinnen und Schülern in Deutschland und in Polen” (Münster: Waxmann 2011). Daniela Jara studied Sociology at the University of Chile. At present she is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and a member of the Embodied Narratives Research Group, a collective based in Goldsmiths. In 2005, her master’s dissertation was awarded the Cátedra Enzo Faletto de Estudios Latinoamericanos prize (Jara, Daniela: “Certificación: La emergencia de un capital simbólico”. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad de Chile. Santiago, Chile, 2005). In 2008 she was awarded a scholarship from the Chilean government to undertake her current Phd research on the aftermath of violence in the post-Pinochet Chile and the way memories have been passed on into the next generations. Interested in the intersection between theory and politics, between 2004 and 2008 Daniela worked as an associate researcher at the Institute of Political Ecology (IEP) and the Latin American Faculty of Social Science (FLACSO). Daniela Koleva is associate professor at the Department for History and Theory of Culture, University of Sofia. Her research interests are in the field of oral history and anthropology of socialism and post-socialism, biographical and cultural memory, biographical methods, social constructivism. She has published a monograph on the “normal life course” in communist Bulgaria (Biography and Normality, 2002, in Bulgarian) and a number of book chapters and articles in peerreviewed international journals. Recent (co)edited volumes include: “Negotiating Normality: Everyday Lives in Socialist Institutions” (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers 2012) and “20 Years after the Collapse of Communism: Expectations, Achievements and Disillusions of 1989” (Bern: Peter Lang 2011, coedited with N. Hayoz and L. Jesien). Her current work is on vernacular memory of socialism in Bulgaria, everyday ethnic identities and inter-ethnic tensions in mixed population regions (part of FP6 MICROCON project) and an AHRC/ESRC funded project on religious and secular life-course rituals in the UK, Romania and Bulgaria. Jan Lohl holds a PhD in Social Sciences and currently works as postdoctoral research fellow at the Sigmund Freud Institut (Frankfurt/M.). His research interests are psychoanalysis and social psychology, political psychology, psychoa-

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nalysis and qualitative research, psychoanalytical generations research, research on nationalism and anti-semitism. Recent publications: Jan Lohl & Markus Brunner (Hg.): “Unheimliche Wiedergänger? Zur Politischen Psychologie des NS-Erbes in der 68er-Generation” (Gießen: Psychosozial 2011); Lohl, Jan et al. (Hg.): “Volksgemeinschaft, Täterschaft und Antisemitismus. Beiträge zur psychoanalytischen Soziapsychologie des Nationalsozialismus und seiner Nachwirkungen” (Gießen: Psychosozial 2011). Joseph Maslen is lecturer in History at Edge Hill University. He has taught at the universities of Birmingham and Manchester and at Sheffield Hallam University, and has published on memory, narrative and life-writing, historical sociology, and the history of the emotions. He is co-editor of “Perspectives on Conflict” (2006) and “Authentic Artifice: Cultures of the Real” (2007), both published by the European Studies Research Institute at the University of Salford. Anne Muxel holds a PhD in Sociology; she is Research Director at CNRS, CEVIPOF (Sciences Po Center for Political Research). Her major fields of research are: political behavior (political socialization, political attitudes and electoral behaviour of young people); European studies, comparative politics (political participation in Europe, European identity, migrations within Europe); intergenerational transmission of values and social change; family, transmission and memory; politics, affects, emotions. Her publications are, i. a.: “Individu et mémoire familiale” (Pairs: Hachette Pluriel, 2007); “Toi, moi et la politique. Amour et convictions” (Paris: Seuil 2008); “Avoir 20 ans en politique. Les enfants du désenchantement” (Paris: Seuil 2010); Muxel, Anne (Éd.): “La politique au fil de l’âge” (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po 2011). Alena Pfoser holds a degree in Sociology from the University of Vienna and completed a master in Russian and Eurasian Studies at the European University at St. Petersburg in 2010. Since 2010 she is pursuing her PhD on the transformation of the Russian-Estonian borderland at Loughborough University (UK). She is interested in memory, migration and nationalism as well as theories of space and place. Her publications include: “Meine Oma, die Heldin. Bedeutungen von ‘Heroismus’ in Erzählungen von Nachkommen über die Leningrader Belagerung“, Zeitgeschichte 36 (2) (2009). Denis Scuto holds a PhD in history from the Free University of Brussels; he teaches contemporary history and history didactics at the University of Luxembourg. His research interests are, i.a., working class history and migration histo-

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ry. As researcher he is also involved in European networks on access to citizenship and its impact on immigrant integration (EUCITAC, ACIT) as an expert for Luxembourg. Recent publications: (with Elisabeth Boesen) “Historical testimony and social transformation. On memory processes in farmer and steelworker families in Luxemburg”. Journal of Comparative Family Studies 42(3) (2011); “Paul Eyschen entre État libéral et État-nation”, in: J. P. Leider et al. (Éds.): Du Luxembourg à l’Europe. Hommages à Gilbert Trausch à l’occasion de son 80e anniversaire (Luxembourg: Ed. Saint-Paul 2011); “Entre solidarité et concurrence: Syndicalisme ouvrier luxembourgeois et immigrants dans l’entre-deuxguerres.” Mutations. Mémoires et perspectives du Bassin minier 4 (2012); “La nationalité luxembourgeoise (XIXe-XXIe siècles). Histoire d’un alliage européen.” (Bruxelles: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles 2012) Renée Wagener holds an M.A. in social sciences and currently works as a research associate at the University of Luxembourg. As a doctoral candidate at the University of Hagen, she is preparing a thesis on the history of the Jewish Community in Luxembourg. She is also working as a journalist for the Luxembourg weekly woxx, and as a consultant in the social and political field. Among her more recent publications are: “‘Geld für den Haushalt verdienen’. Weibliche Lohnarbeit im 19. Jahrhundert aus der Sicht der Luxemburger Geschichtsschreibung“, in: Claude D. Conter & Nicole Sahl (Hg.): Aufbrüche und Vermittlungen: Beiträge zur Luxemburger und europäischen Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag 2010); “D’Lëtzebuerger Republik: von Schande und Scheitern“, in: Kmec, Sonja & Pit Péporté (Éds.): Lieux de mémoire au Luxembourg 2; “Zwischen Anerkennung und Exklusion: Jüdische Emanzipation in Luxemburg und das décret infâme“, in: Frishman, Judith, Thorsten Fuchshuber & Christian Wiese (Eds.): Samuel Hirsch, Religionsphilosoph, Emanzipationsverfechter und radikaler Reformer. Jüdische Identität im 19. Jahrhundert am Beispiel von Werk und Wirkung des ersten Oberrabbiners Luxemburgs (to appear in 2012).