Writing biography in the face of cultural trauma: Nazi descent and the management of spoiled identities
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Writing biography in the face of cultural trauma: Nazi descent and the management of spoiled identities Joachim J. Savelsberg1 Accepted: 19 October 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract Cultural trauma after mass violence poses challenges in micro-social settings. Children and grandchildren of the perpetrator generation address these challenges in multiple, more or less fictionalized, biographies and family histories, explored here for the case of the Nazi Regime and the Holocaust. Their books serve, at one level, as quarries for harvesting depictions of interactive situations in which intra- and intergenerational sets of actors manage stigma through practices of silencing, denying and acknowledging in the context of family and friendship circles. At another level, biographies themselves constitute efforts at managing the authors’ spoiled identities through their conversation with an imagined audience. In retelling family history and reporting interactive situations, authors are torn between the desire to engage with—and cleanse themselves from—a polluting past and to maintain family loyalties and affective bonds. Keywords Cultural trauma · Stigma · Literature · Interaction · Holocaust · Silencing
Introduction: cultural trauma, social interaction and family history in literature Cultural sociology has provided important insights into the emergence of cultural trauma after major catastrophes, especially episodes of mass atrocity. Yet its practitioners have engaged less with the adaptation of intimate groups, families and close friendship circles to such shifting cultural contexts. If cultural trauma implies recognition of past evil, how do children and grandchildren of perpetrator generations make sense of their families’ history and of their own existence? How do they hold on to affective ties and family loyalties? How do they deal with the stigma of
* Joachim J. Savelsberg [email protected] 1
Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota, 909 Social Sciences Building, 267 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA Vol.:(0123456789)
J. J. Savelsberg
a perpetrator people and, additionally, a perpetrator family? How do they manage their sense of guilt or responsibility, how their spoiled identities? While these questions are relevant in many contexts, this article explores them for the specific and extreme case of Germans in the decades after the Holocaust. I use, as an empirical basis, selected family histories, more or less fictionalized, written by children and grandchildren of the World War II generation. Importantly, I do so at two distinct levels of analysis. At the first level, the books serve as quarries, sources of information about interactive situations in which actors within and across generations silenced, denied or acknowledged the past in intimate contexts of family and friendship circles. At the second level, these books—written in the 2000s—are documents in which the authors themselves struggle with their nation’s horrendous past and their fathers’ or grandfathers’ actual or s
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