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Rewriting Memories: Family Recollections of the National Socialist Past in Germany

Hannover, Germany

Harald Welzer

Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen, Germany

This article deals with the question of how personal memories of the national socialist past in Germany are passed on to younger generations. Rather than viewing this process as an unidirectional handing down of memories from generation to generation, examination is made of how memories are negotiated and re-created in intergenerational discourse. Drawing on a series of case studies, there is discussion of how the meaning of past experiences is construed and organized within particular narrative genres. In order to understand the ways memories are recomposed in the course of social transmission, the analysis highlights the role of group concerns. Against this backdrop, Bartlett’s observations on the repeated reproduction of narratives and Halbwachs’ ideas on the collective memory of the family are presented and discussed as early versions of a sociocultural approach in psychology.

Key Words: history • intergenerational transmission of memories • narrative • social remembering

Culture & Psychology, Vol. 8, No. 1, 130-145 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/1354067X02008001625


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