Defeat as Childhood Experience: WWII’s Shadow Remembered, Revisited, and Researched --- Excerpt fron Introduction

 

 Excerpts from the INTRODUCTION

The memories of which I speak are of the end of WWII and the reality of living within Germany’s defeat during the war’s shadow-years 1945 to 1955. When we fled Allied bombing, when my grandmother discovered the first question mark on my forehead, I was left in no doubt that we who fled were in the wrong. So, who and what I am—guarded and guided by those who survived or were favoured in my memory—goes back to that point and forward to the point that I am at this writing....

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 While this book can be seen as an autoethnography in the sense that I am a participant-observer who is “familiar with the inner features” of the people of my country at war, the term does not quite capture what is most important in this study, namely, the intimate interrelationship between memory and history. It means that it is better to characterize the book as a memoir that relied on two sets of academic tools: first, remembered childhood war experiences served as tools that initiated this study; and second, memories of vocabulary, addresses, towns, institutions, colors, and emotions served as research tools used to identify research sites and relevant archives where traces of our past were stored....

 

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In sum, as a child I was affected by and observed a defeat that had no name. One of the reasons was, of course, that I was not privy to the information about specific actors or actions that brought it about. Here a look at documents stored in archives was revealing. Documents did not so much correct memories; indeed, only small if significant aspects of some memories were corrected. Rather, archival research showed what the nature of the local political and material forces were that affected not only mother’s breakdowns, but also my frequent movement between the British and Soviet Zone.

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