Moral Heroes or Suffering Persons? Ancestors in Family Intergenerational Stories and the Intersection of Family and National Memories (original) (raw)

Daughters ' Stories: Family Memory and Generational Amnesia

After World War II, most Bulgarian Jews emigrated legally to Israel. Those who stayed had to take part in the building of socialism and integrate in a monolithic " socialist nation. " Thereby they had to " forget " their ethnic identity (" aided " by the state in various ways). Since 1990, a revival of Jewish identity has begun in Bulgaria. Here, I explore how the women of three generations from the same family reinvent their Jewish identity in their life stories. Drawing on this particular case, I suggest an approach to the question of the interplay of individual and collective memory. I focus on family and generation as different types of collectivities influencing individual memories and self-actualizations. Looking for a way to establish meaningful links between collective memory and personal memory, I consider the notion of generation and try to explore its potential. To make sense of this particular case, I work with two notions of memory: the very concrete one of personal autobiographical memory and the broader (and more problematic) one of collective memory.

Memory in the shadow of a family history of resistance: A case study of the significance of collective memories for intergenerational memory in Austrian families

Memory Studies, 2019

Collective references are of crucial significance for the individual memory. This article discusses the formation and transformation of intergenerational memory in situations where a hegemonic national memory discourse provides the only available reference point. On the basis of a biographical and multigenerational single case study of one family, the article traces the constitution of an intergenerational memory which is marked by the fact that, in their remembering, the family members' only reference point is an Austrian national memory that disowns resistance to Nazism and downplays the role of Austrians in Nazi crimes. The fact that family members have no access to an alternative collective memory that acknowledges the resistance has a crucial influence on the intergenerational memory: the role of resistance in the family history is depoliticized and dehistoricized, and the Nazis are relieved of responsibility for their actions. Along this empirical finding, the article discusses the significance of the entanglement and figuration of collective reference, individual memory and intergenerational memory.

Remembering and reminiscing: How individual lives are constructed in family narratives

Memory Studies, 2008

Stories we tell about our lives very much define who we are as individuals, within particular families, cultures and historical periods. In this article, I review psychological research that demonstrates how autobiographical memories are created and re-created in daily interactions in which we share our stories with others, and how this process is modulated by individual, gendered and cultural models of self expressed in everyday family reminiscing. I focus on two critical developmental periods: the preschool years when autobiography is just beginning to emerge; and adolescence when autobiographical memories begin to coalesce into an overarching life narrative that defines self, others and values. I show how individual differences in the ways in which families reminisce are related to individual autobiographical narratives. Importantly, just as our individual narratives are shaped by cultural and historical models of selves and lives, individuals come to shape their culture and thei...

Memories (Un)told – Identity Construction Through Practices of Transgenerational Storytelling

Rocznik Polsko-Niemiecki, 2020

The memories of the end of World War II play a significant role among the German minority in Poland. These memories are not only important for the generation who experienced that time, but they also influence the following generations to whom these memories were passed onto by their families. This article presents the end of World War II from the perspective of the young generation of the German minority in Opole and its surroundings, who were born in the 1980s and 1990s and whose narrative resembles the narrative of German post-war history. Both narratives circulate in family memories, and each generation developed a characteristic approach to the culture of remembrance based on the different political systems after 1945. Therefore, the war generation that grew up in communist Poland, also known as the ‘lost generation’, and the generation of grandchildren living in democratic Poland have to face family memories together. At the same time, it becomes clear how, in what form and whe...

Family Stories and Global (Hi)Stories

Teaching history , 2020

Based on the ‘disciplinary approach’, this paper describes history teaching activities that took place in primary and secondary school contexts in Greece, in which family memories were collected and interpreted. The study was based on two groups of different ages, 11-12 and 16-17 year olds. Pupils whose relatives had immigrated to Greece or sought refuge during different historic periods, presented their family stories to their classmates. They were then questioned by their classmates and through a process of vertical and horizontal analysis of oral narrative processes associated with various activities; the pupils were able to more effectively link their own micro-history with the macro-history of the period in question. The study concluded that family memories can be used as a springboard for exploring the individual and family past of pupils and their association with important historical events that constitute the distant past for most of them. Family history serves as a bridge connecting past and present. In addition, the official historical narrative is enriched with alternative interpretations and new perspectives by using different personal histories. The narration of these stories within the school community raised a variety of historical questions related to concepts of historical thinking during the learning process. For example, change through time, significance, cause and consequence, empathy and the moral dimension of interpretations of the past. Important conclusions were also drawn as to how the teaching of family history may contribute to the formation of a more open individual identity for pupils, when they recognise migration and refugees in their own family past and are able to integrate it within the historical space-time context.

Mapping the Intergenerational Memory of the Holocaust in Hungarian Bystander Families: The Case of Sacha Batthyány’s Identity Novel, Und was hat das mit mir zu tun? [‘And What Does That Have to Do With Me?’]

Hungarian Cultural Studies, 2017

In this study, Kunt examines the intergenerational memory of the Holocaust in Hungarian bystander families. Communicative memory plays a key role in intergenerational relationships, as it allows the transmission of the family’s own interpretation of the past to younger generations, thereby becoming an important pillar of individual and family identity. Kunt’s analysis finds that in the memory of bystander families he has studied in Hungary, the persecution of the Jewish population is only marginally present, for several reasons. One is that the intergenerational communication of such memories has been scarce, as these memories in particular are seldom passed down to the third and fourth generations. Another reason is that the majority of Hungarian society is characterized by a sense of competitive victimhood, where many families impress upon their descendants the severity of their own historical losses while simultaneously dismissing or trivializing the losses of other social groups...

Transgenerational Memory: From Pre-Holocaust to Post-Yugoslavia

The study focuses on Fanika as an example of documentary writing by first-and second-generation survivors, i.e. women in the mother-daughter relationship (Hanna Altarac/Fanika Lučić and Branka Jovičić), both from Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. The timeline of the life story of Hanna/Fanika, born in 1922 in a Sephardic family from Sarajevo, coincides on the macro level with the history of Yugoslavia (the establishment of the state and the interwar period, World War Two and the Holocaust, the postwar socialist period, the break-up of the country and post-Yugoslavia), which is important for the contextualization of the narrative. We have analyzed the motivation of first-generation survivor Fanika Lučić to present her memories of the Holocaust, highlighting the importance of communicative memory as an instrument of their transmission to a second-generation survivor as well as the process involved in their transfer from private to public narrative. Further analysis refers to the generic frames of the narrative, its hybrid character, and its liminal position at a point where biography and autobiography meet and interact. Mediation is a key procedure in Fanika, so attention has been dedicated to determining the degrees of mediation, their variation throughout the narrative and their impact on the substructures (narrative segments). Finally, we have identified,

Soviet heroes and Jewish victims: One family's memories of World War II

Picturing the Family Media, Narrative, Memory. Edited BySilke Arnold-de Simine, Joanne Leal, 2018

In this chapter, the authors take Igor’s family as a revealing case of generational conflicts of interpretation that arise over family photographs. They focuses on Assmann’s distinction between social, political and cultural memory, as well as Hayden White’s notion of ‘emplotment’ to understand the variety of ways in which generational accounts of family history function at the intersection of visual evidence, memory formats and genres of historical narration. His narration of the family archive was refracted through the prism of what Aleida Assmann would term the political, or national memory culture around the Second World War – or, rather, the Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Russia. The ambivalence surrounding Jewish identity among secular urban Soviet Jews has been extensively described by Slezkine as well as others, and it is quite clear here that Igor did not treat this aspect of his father’s identity as one that deserved extensive commentary or a central place in the narrative.