‘Dead dads’: memory narratives of war-related fatherlessness in Germany
09 Apr 2015-European Review of History: Revue europeenne d'histoire (Routledge)-Vol. 22, Iss: 2, pp 259-276
TL;DR: This paper examined 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.
Abstract: 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...
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the various ways in which the Second World War shaped children's experiences in the post-war period and investigate the childhood policies directed towards them, as well as their childhood experiences and the memories they foster about their childhood.
Abstract: 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.
41 citations
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TL;DR: This paper examined how the Hitler Youth generation narrated their family stories by analyzing archived memoirs, published memoirs and school essays from the1947-1949 period of the Third Reich.
Abstract: 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...
12 citations
Cites background from "‘Dead dads’: memory narratives of w..."
...Lu Seeger’s work on fatherlessness and children’s memories of fathers (those children born from 1935 onward) elucidates the complex memories, family stories, and postmemories children may have of their fathers decades later.(25) Earlier Germanlanguage works focused on the psychological effects of Nazism on generations, showing how the silencing of negative family stories has long-term consequences on family members....
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15 Nov 1997TL;DR: Hirsch explores the photographic conventions for constructing family relationships and discusses artistic strategies for challenging those constructions as mentioned in this paper, highlighting the gap between lived reality and a perceived ideal to witness contradictions that shape visual representations.
Abstract: Family photographs, snapshots and portraits, affixed to the refrigerator or displayed in gilded frames, crammed into shoeboxes or catalogued in albums, they preserve ancestral history and perpetuate memories. Indeed, photography has become the family's primary means of self-representation. In this book Marianne Hirsch uncovers both the deception and the power behind this visual record. Hirsch explores the photographic conventions for constructing family relationships and discusses artistic strategies for challenging those constructions. When we capture our family photographically, we are often responding to an idealized image. Contemporary artists and writers, Hirsch shows, have exposed the gap between lived reality and a perceived ideal to witness contradictions that shape visual representations of parents and children, siblings, lovers, or extended families. Exploring fiction, imagetexts, and photographic essays, she elucidates their subversive devices, giving particular attention to literal and metaphorical masks. While permitting false impressions and misreadings, family photos have also proved a means for shaping personal and cultural memory. Hirsch highlights an example: the wide variety of family pictures surviving the Holocaust and the displacements of late-20th-century history. Whether personal treasures, artistic constructions, or museum installations, these images link private memory to collective history.
1,322 citations