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.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 34-64 |
Number of pages | 31 |
Journal | American Journal of Cultural Sociology |
Volume | 10 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:I thank Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg for contributions to stigma management; Alejandro Baer for feedback on an earlier draft; anonymous reviewers for the AJCS and Jeff Alexander as editor for their critique and guidance; Johanna Muckenhuber, Wolfgang Savelsberg, and Hakan Seckinelgin for supplying me with books; the authors of the books I analyze here, especially Nora Krug for courage and inspiring communication; and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study for the opportunity to write a first draft.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, Springer Nature Limited.
Keywords
- Cultural trauma
- Holocaust
- Interaction
- Literature
- Silencing
- Stigma