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Article Excerpt
HISTORY IS NOT ONLY ON THE CURRICULUM, AND IT IS NOT ONLY THE subject of books, journals, radio and television programs, or public debates that explicitly deal with the past and with the question of how to remember it in an adequate way. * History is also conveyed en passant. It is inscribed in the fabric of everyday life, in people's habits and routines, in things they live with and places they go to. Be it in the course of day-to-day conversations, be it in the context of events in the life of a community, historical experiences are passed on from one generation to the next. Rather than, first and foremost, thinking about the past, people here are doing history.
In what follows, I shall deal with the question of how experiences and memories are handed down in family contexts. It is, to be more precise, German family contexts and the ways recollections of the national-socialist past are handed down from one generation to the next. The analyses will include personal memories of people who spent part of their life in the Third Reich as well as the recollections of their children and grandchildren.
These analyses are part of an extensive study (Welzer et al., 2002) on the formation of historical consciousness in the course of which members of 40 East and West German families were interviewed (n=182). Each person was interviewed individually and independently from the others. The members of the older generation, the so-called contemporary witnesses, were asked to give an account of their life in the Third Reich; the members of the younger generations, their children and grandchildren, were questioned about what they know of the life of their ancestors in this historical period. Furthermore, individual family members were brought together for a family session to talk about personal histories as well as about the history of the Third Reich.
The interviewers were instructed to follow as much as possible the rules of ordinary conversation. A list of themes that should be touched on in the interview actually served as a kind of implicit guideline for the interview, but apart from that the interviewers were free to spontaneously react to their interlocutors as well as to the situation they found themselves in. As we were interested in the dynamics of present-day intergenerational discourse on the Third Reich we conceived of the interviews as actually reflecting these dynamics and not so much as a window on the somehow hidden social world of our interviewees.
HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE THIRD REICH
In Germany, Holocaust education, teaching through memorials, and school lessons about National Socialism and the Holocaust are quite successful. Survey data show that young Germans are generally quite well informed about the historical events and can associate correctly with keywords such as "Auschwitz" and "SS." Thus, education on the history of the Third Reich might be considered a successfully completed project--but only if one does not ask what use the young recipients of these educational offerings actually make of the product. Knowledge and the use of knowledge are two different things.
The transmission of history is accompanied by a range of subtexts--fascinating, daunting, anesthetizing--and historical information is interpreted within a frame of reference that exists outside of school (Wineburg, 2001, 2002; Seixas 2001; Welzer et al., 2007). As recent studies show, young people in Germany acquire knowledge of history in general, and of Nazism and the Holocaust in particular, in a way very different from what their educators have intended. Formal lessons aim to pass on knowledge, but they cannot compete with the emotional wallop of images from the past offered by most other sources.
But research on the effects of Holocaust educational efforts has only slowly broadened. Until recently, the research field was characterized by quantitative studies on historical consciousness (see, for example, Angvik and yon Bottles, 2000), and by very few qualitative studies of the ways in which young Germans deal with the history of an unparalleled crime whose occurrence overlapped with the lifetimes of their grandparents and great-grandparents (Moiler, 2003; Jensen, 2004; Gudehus, 2006). The results show, for example, that students learn one primary thing in classes on the Third Reich: how to speak in a politically correct way about the problematic past (Hollstein et al., 2002), or that immigrant children use their sometimes intensive study of the Nazi past as a ticket to seeing themselves as "true Germans" (Georgi, 2003). Gudehus (2005) could show that tour guides perform individual versions of history at memorial sites of the Holocaust.
The multigenerational study at hand observes the direct communication of concepts about the past in German families and finds a pronounced discrepancy between the official and the private cultures of remembrance in Germany. In the first section this paper discusses structural aspects of stories that are handed down from one generation to the next. In the second section it shows how the past is jointly constructed in intergenerational communication. The third section describes a process of "cumulative heroization" in intergenerational conversations. The paper closes with a discussion of the results of a representative study on the images Germans hold about their parents and grandparents in the Third Reich.
STRUCTURAL ASPECTS OF TRANSMITTING HISTORY
Rainer Hofer, (1) born in 1925, was a NAPOLA (National Socialist elite school) student and a member of the Waffen-SS and of the SS-unit Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler (named after Hitler's personal bodyguard unit). He presents himself, both in the individual interview and the family discussion, as a reformed Nazi. Although he wrote in his diary, at the news of the fuhrer's death, "My best comrade has fallen," in his retrospective telling, he was soon appalled by the Nazi crimes. Hofer, well read and well educated, made a career in postwar Germany as a manager. He speaks about joining the Waffen-SS, entering the Leibstandarte, participating in the Russian campaign, and, in 1943, being deployed as an SS-man in the Ukraine. In this connection, the interviewer asks:
Interviewer: Are there any stories that you wouldn't tell your daughter or your grandchildren?
Rainer Hofer: No, I would be completely open. I don't need to tell them that I shot Jews [bangs on the table] or that sort of thing; even if I had done it, I would tell about it. Why?. It's my daughter and I lived my life. I can't let any of it somehow sink into the Hades of the past. I can't do that. There's nothing I'd say I wouldn't tell her, even if it touched on the honor of German soldiers. I remember once that we rode to an attack, and when we came back, attached to infantry, a couple of Russian soldiers were idiotic enough to surrender. Of course, they didn't live a moment longer (knocks on the table). But that, of course, was one of those things: Where were they supposed to ride with us? In the tank? They could have had a hand grenade hidden somewhere (laughs).... If they had just laid low, nothing would have happened. But I'd tell my daughter that, although it actually touched the honor of German soldiers. I can't say there was anything that I wouldn't tell her or my granddaughter either, no. Why should I?
As though to prove his supposed openness, Hofer describes to the interviewer a crime that might be enough to sully "the honor of German soldiers." There is no questioning of this crime from today's perspective whatsoever. To the contrary, Hofer provides a justification for the murder of the Russian prisoners--obviously assuming that his calculus would be apparent, even to the interviewer. And anyway, this is all part of his life as he lived it--so why, asks Hofer rhetorically, shouldn't he tell about it?
As further evidence of Mr. Hofer's openness, the Hofer family archive even contains letters he sent home from the...
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