TY - JOUR
T1 - Writing biography in the face of cultural trauma
T2 - Nazi descent and the management of spoiled identities
AU - Savelsberg, Joachim J.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, Springer Nature Limited.
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Cultural trauma
KW - Holocaust
KW - Interaction
KW - Literature
KW - Silencing
KW - Stigma
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U2 - 10.1057/s41290-020-00125-8
DO - 10.1057/s41290-020-00125-8
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85096116393
JO - American Journal of Cultural Sociology
JF - American Journal of Cultural Sociology
SN - 2049-7113
ER -