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Life Stories as Memory Carriers

Culture of Remembrance and the Importance of Biographical Work and Biographical Research

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Remembrance – Responsibility – Reconciliation

Abstract

Reconstructed life stories and the occupation of biographies of contemporary witnesses from National Socialism and the Holocaust are of central importance for coming to terms with the past. The German culture of remembrance is characterized by personalized, victim-oriented representations with the goal of passing on memories. As part of international and interdisciplinary research, biographies also take on the function of passing on memory, but beyond that they also offer contemporary witnesses individual ways of coming to terms with the past. The article focuses not only on the individual coping possibilities of surviving victims, but also on those of perpetrators and followers.

Translation revised by Brianna Lopez.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The analysis is based on Gabriele Rosenthal’s studies on the biographical processing of National Socialism and the Holocaust by contemporary witnesses (1986, 1987, 1990, 1992,1995, 1999).

  2. 2.

    The distinction between the two groups - survivors and victims, perpetrators and followers - is based the conviction of National Socialis’s crime: the categories of perpetrators and victims are not value-neutral and belong to an ethical and legal discourse. Even though the followers played a passive role, they deal together with the active perpetrators. The term ‘followers’, including its negative connotations, has its origins in postwar denazification procedures i.e. in procedures that involved the determination of individual guilt (Kohlstruck 1997, 38). During their “denazification” campaign, the Allies identified five groups of persons. These groups were formed in order to facilitate the fair “assessment of responsibilities and measures of atonement: 1) Main culprits, 2) persons burdened (activists, militarists and beneficiaries), 3) persons less burdened (probation group), 4) followers and 5) persons relieved (persons of the above groups who can prove before a court that they are not guilty)” (Benz 2005, 1). Internment camps were set up in which former Nazis were arrested in order to bring them to justice. From 1947 the idea of rehabilitation was gradually propagated: Nominee NSDAP members were to be integrated as quickly as possible because they were needed for reconstruction; later, followers were re-granted their right to vote as well as most other civil rights (Benz 2005, 1).

  3. 3.

    As a result of the change in values, “a fundamental shift away from a focus on one’s own nation and thus at the same time from heroic thinking about progress […] [was] initiated in the culture of remembrance. This was accompanied by a cultural pluralization and individualization of memories” (Cornelißen 2014, 29; see Sabrow 2012).

  4. 4.

    For example, the online educational offering “Learning with Interviews“, sponsored by the Foundation “Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft“. Available at: https://lernen-mit-interviews.de/.

  5. 5.

    In Japan social science biographical research is not currently concerned with contemporary witnesses and coming to terms with the past (it was discussed at the workshop).

  6. 6.

    The empirical basis of the following analysis are about 80 biographical-narrative interviews conducted in different research contexts by Gabriele Rosenthal. The following analysis does not guarantee completeness, but shows trends.

  7. 7.

    Thus, it is possible to normalize National Socialism with its crimes by separating war and one’s own actions as a soldier from the political and social context. Accordingly, the biographers assume themselves sufficiently punished for the past by their war imprisonment. On the one hand they assume themselves today no longer accusable and on the other hand they reassure themselves and avoid further reflection (Rosenthal 1990, 140–141).

  8. 8.

    For example, positive memories of membership in National Socialist youth organizations are depicted as ‘youth play’ and presented as apolitical (Rosenthal 1990, 108).

  9. 9.

    The attempt of retrospectively escaping the entanglement and one’s own crimes rather leads to diffuse feelings of guilt, for example through years of nightmares (Rosenthal 1990, 190).

  10. 10.

    Many followers and perpetrators were probably already “aware of the crimes on the Eastern Front” (Jähner 2019, 12) during World War II and they had the diffuse feeling that injustice was being done. However, these feelings were attempted to be faded out and primarily not addressed (Rosenthal 1990, 163), because the crimes in World War II possessed such a dimension that they were banished from the collective consciousness - there was no place in thinking and feeling for the murder of Jews by the millions (Jähner 2019, 12).

  11. 11.

    In addition to the difficulty of speaking about traumatizations, the survivors were and are partly confronted with the fact that their biographical narratives cause incomprehension and disbelief among the listeners: They could not and cannot imagine the atrocities and the suffering of the ordeal and torture in the concentration camps (Jureit and Orth 1994, 9).

  12. 12.

    In psychoanalysis, the process of repression is described as an assumed psychological defense mechanism by which traumas are excluded from conscious awareness.

  13. 13.

    But not being able to tell stories bears the danger of a second traumatization, because “if we do not succeed in bringing experiences into stories, the traumatizations that have arisen in these situations will be further intensified” (Rosenthal 1995, 172; see Rosenthal 1999). However, the repression and blanking out or suspension of memory is sometimes only an intermediate stage that temporarily relieves oneself of the burden (Keval 1998, 266). But to me it remains an important question how we can overcome the forgetting and/or the inability to narrate, so that we avoid further traumatizations.

  14. 14.

    Hebrew synonym for the Holocaust, the mass extermination of Jews under National Socialism.

  15. 15.

    The interactive educational software for school lessons includes a total of twelve video interviews with survivors of the Holocaust and National Socialism. In addition to these video interviews, it includes “assignements, an integrated work editor, transcripts, translations, photographs, texts, films, audios, facsimiles, animated maps, a lexicon, a media library, and method tips.” (Federal Agency for Civic Education/bpb, Freie Universität Berlin, place of publication: Bonn).

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Acknowledgements

This paper is based on the presentation “Remember, Repress, Conceal: The importance of biographical work“ at the workshop “Remembrance — Responsibility — Reconciliation. New Challenges for Education in Germany and Japan” on October 01-02, 2019 at Sophia University Tōkyō, Japan.

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  1. Faculty of Cultural Studies and Social Sciences, Chair of Empirical Education Research, FernUniversität in Hagen, Hagen, Deutschland

    Nora Berner

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  1. FK 12, Technische Universität Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany

    Lothar Wigger

  2. Deutsche Abteilung, Fremdsprachenuniversität Kyoto, Kyoto, Japan

    Marie Dirnberger

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Berner, N. (2022). Life Stories as Memory Carriers. In: Wigger, L., Dirnberger, M. (eds) Remembrance – Responsibility – Reconciliation. Kindheit – Bildung – Erziehung. Philosophische Perspektiven. J.B. Metzler, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64185-9_10

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