Telling Untold Tales: Concealed Family Stories in Contemporary Fiction (original) (raw)
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The Poetics of Loss or Imaginative Redescriptions? Narrative Strategies in Recent Memory Texts
This paper engages with current psychological and social articulations of trans-generational trauma as experienced by both the “second” and the “third” (post-war) generation. At this point, an increasing historical remove contributes to levelling poignant and incontrovertible differences between perpetrator and victim experiences of the legacy of National Socialism. Marianne Hirsch’s seminal conceptualization of transgenerational memory as “postmemory,” for instance, applies to the formation and contradictions of an inherited memory for children and grandchildren of both victims and perpetrators. Yet, I argue, we need to understand the interdependence and terms of these ‘memory symptoms,’ along with the seeming proximity of such disparate subject- positions as part of a far-reaching historical legacy without dissolving them into a convenient and potentially apologetic history of German suffering. The central question posed by the legacy of Auschwitz may be condensed to: Is it possible to express an engagement with that catastrophic legacy without repressing, denying, or nostalgically rewriting painful memories on the one hand, or circumventing complicity by assuming an undifferentiated position of ‘victim of history,’ on the other hand? This question is particularly poignant in light of the fact that such strategies were often employed to articulate war and postwar memories of the first generation tainted by affect and guilt, and as such passed on to the second and third generation. Taking my cue from recent literary studies that have underscored the ability of literature and cinema to express concealed, repressed, or uncomfortable truths about the past, I focus on the aesthetic representation of history as part of what Amir Eshel has called “the poetics of loss.” In fact, I share and want to build on Eshel’s premise that works of literature do not set out to “master” the past but instead present “imaginative redescriptions” (as used by Rorty) , new vocabularies with which to grasp the contradictions and impasses of history. Understood as such “imaginative redescriptions,” the aesthetic representations of history under consideration here no longer allow the question of a ‘proper or improper’ engagement of history and instead their analysis is driven by the desire to understand rather than to know. In a way, these memory texts dramatize history as a Schlüsselszene, as fiction sustained by what Benjamin has called mémoire involontaire, a memory fed by images, “which we never saw until we remembered.” With this premise, I propose to analyze narrative strategies as employed in recent tetxts by Hans-Ulrich Treichel (Der Verlorene) and Katharina Hacker (Eine Art Liebe) as attempts to stage what may be termed a perspective of ‚trans-generational difference’ with respect to the psychological, social and socio-economic effects of war.
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...
“In Search of a Tale They can Live With”: About Loss, Family Secrets, and Selective Disclosure
Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 2011
Several authors have written about family secrets in the family therapy literature in interesting ways. According to these authors, the questions ''who knows the secret?'' and ''who does not know the secret?'' are central. In the present study, we have qualitatively analyzed the documentary film Familiegeheim (Family Secret) by the Dutch director Jaap van Hoewijk. The film shows van Hoewijk's investigation into the death of his father in 1974 and tells the story of a family in which the suicide of the father is kept secret from the three children. Our analysis of the film highlights the complex ways in which families deal with sensitive issues like loss, grief, and suicide. The concept of family secrets seems to poorly capture this complexity, focusing one-sidedly on the destructive effects of withholding delicate information. The concept of selective disclosure is proposed as an alternative. Selective disclosure refers to the complex processes involved in dealing with the dialectic tension between sharing information and keeping it secret. The concept is not only focused on the destructiveness of secrecy but, in addition, also makes room for an appreciation of the caution with which family members deal with sensitive family issues.. . .and then mother said 'daddy was in an accident and daddy is dead.'.. . (Quote from the movie Familiegeheim) As family therapists, we are privileged that we can listen to families talk intimately about their struggles, their love for each other, their worries, their sorrow, and their pain. However, in our practices, very often we meet families in which some important things are not said. We are in conversation with them, and first there is talk, but then there is a slight hesitation, a vague movement of the body, and a silence. And then they talk about something else. This article will report on a qualitative study we did on family secrecy, and on some of our reflections about the concept of family secrets that developed from doing this study. In the first part of the article, we will review the literature on the subject of family secrecy, and then, in the second part, we will analyze as a case in point the documentary film Familiegeheim 1 (Family Secret) by the Dutch director Jaap van Hoewijk to reflect on the complexity of the concept of family secrets. Familiegeheim is a film van Hoewijk made about his own family and in particular about the death of his father in 1974. The film tells the story of a family in which a traumatic
Review of Gabriele Schwab's Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (2010)
The Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature, 2013
In Chapter Two of Haunting Legacies, Gabriele Schwab reflects on growing up in post-World War II Germany with her parents' stories of the war. She confesses that it took her "almost half a century to understand that the purpose of those stories was not to remember but to forget. They were supposed to cover up, to mute the pain and guilt and shame, to fill the void of terror" (43). Schwab also remembers being attuned to a discrepancy between what these stories related and what they seemed to hide: "It was as if the words themselves were emptied of the very feelings invoked in me when I was confronted with the facts of horror. It was not that the stories were devoid of emotions but rather that words and emotions did not quite fit together; words echoed falsely" (43). What got handed down to a young Gabriele in the aftermath of World War II, then, was a narrative that worked against itself, its own telling, its revelation. For the disjunction between how her parents remembered the war and what they intended their memories to communicate signalled a register of mortal trauma that remained inaccessible to this child even as its remains shaped her everyday life, her knowledge of family structures, and her sense of worth both within her home and, eventually, a larger national landscape.
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.
Journal of Family History, 2019
This article adds to recent intergenerational family memory research by presenting an empirical study of three-generational stories recounted by thirteen families in the Czech Republic. By drawing on a detailed and rigorous methodological approach, this article focuses on the topic of stories, their emotionality, and the personal traits of the heroes. The majority of families told their family stories in a prototypical, perhaps archetypal fashion, depicting their ancestors as heroes under circumstances of danger, fear, and threat. A tendency to valorize ancestors is observed in the stories framed by important historical events while private family stories tend to have more of an amusing character. Why a family shares that or another type of stories depends on many circumstances, particularly on a long-lived and generative ancestor, intergenerational relations, and family values.