Welzer, Harald, et al. “Opa war kein Nazi”: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis.

In Opa War Kein Nazi, Welzer et al. explore how second and most of all third generation Germans perceive their family members who lived through World War II. The authors analysed material they gathered through listening to family conversations in forty families, as well as conducting individual interviews. The authors claim that the particular memory community of the family is different from the broader, cultural memory. The grandchildren of those who lived through World War II tend to think of their grandparents as heroes or victims, and for the most part refuse to conceive of their grandparents as having been perpetrators in the war – ‘Grandpa wasn’t a Nazi.’

This book is only available in German. The Collective Memory Reader (ed. Jeffrey K. Olick et al.) contains a translated excerpt from Chapter 2, “Familiengedächtnis: Über die gemeinsame Verfertigung der Vergangenheit im Gespräch.” In this excerpt, Welzer et al. pose that memories “always [involve] re-inscription” (344). This can alter the memory of an event; a memory, then, consists both of the memory of the event itself and its recollection, which cannot be seen separately. They argue that this way of thinking about memory distinguishes cognitive memory without affective significance from memory with emotional significance, which does change when recalled. Where uncomfortable memories threaten to surface, as for instance in conversations about World War II within the family community, the “authenticity of memories” (344) is threatened. Whereas German post-war generations have been educated about the Holocaust and Nazism, they often tend to insist that their (grand)parents could not have been perpetrators in World War II. This ties in with the coherence of the “fictive unity of family memory” (344). Re-calling and re-membering keeps the group identity coherent, but this identity is threatened when new memories surface, for instance when it turns out that a family member, the great-grandfather, for example, was a Nazi.

Welzer et al. provide a way of thinking about memory as connected to generating (familial) identity, as well as posing a way of thinking about memory as not being fixed, and being altered when drawn upon by recalling the memory. Their study also points at the apparent contradiction of post-war generations knowing, through cultural memory, that some of the generation of their (grand)parents were perpetrators, but through family memory refuse to acknowledge this when it pertains to their own family.

Author of this entry: Nynke Hartvelt

Welzer, Harald, et al. 2002. Excerpt from Opa war kein Nazi”: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis. In The Collective Memory Reader, edited by Jeffrey Olick et al., 343-45. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.