In this Special Issue, the authors explore the various ways in which the Second World War shaped children's experiences in the post-war period. They map the multifaceted interest or non-interest of states all over Europe for children in the years after the war, filter out groups of children who recall that the consequences of the Second World War significantly influenced their childhood, and investigate the childhood policies directed towards them, as well as their childhood experiences and the memories they foster about their childhood. In addition, they have included case studies from Western, Central and Eastern Europe with the aim of sparking a debate as to whether it was only a similar lifecycle that war children in early post-war Europe shared, or if they also had some life experiences in common.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13507486.2015.1008410

Growing up in the shadow of the Second World War: European perspectives

This article examines how the Hitler Youth generation (born 1925–1933) narrativizes their family stories by analyzing archived memoirs, published memoirs, and school essays from the1947–1949 period...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0363199019880254

Memory, Family, and the Self in Hitler Youth Generation Narratives

What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany.Elizabeth D. Heineman

"Wer die Zeit nicht miterlebt hat. ..": Frauenerfahrungen im Zweiten Weltkrieg und in den Jahren danach (review)

Erinnerungen an die ›Volksgemeinschaft‹. Integration und Exklusion im kommunalen und kommunikativen Gedächtnis

After the Second World War, there were estimated to be around 20 million half-orphans in Europe. In Germany alone, 5.3 million soldiers killed in action left behind approximately 1.2 million widows, nearly 2.5 million half-orphans and about 100,000 complete orphans. This article examines how men and women from various social strata in western and eastern Germany remember their fathers who died in the war and in what way he has been stored in the family's collective memory. The analysis focuses on 30 life-history interviews with men and women from eastern and western Germany with various social and religious backgrounds, all of whom were born between 1935 and 1945 and had little or no memory of their fathers. The following questions are relevant: what memories did children have of their fathers, and what images of them were related by mothers and relatives? What individual, political, social and memory-cultural factors characterise a child's memory of her or his father? The article also analyses trans-gene...

Lu Seegers

Papers

‘Dead dads’: memory narratives of war-related fatherlessness in Germany