Veiling and denying the past : the dialogue in families of Holocaust survivors and families of Nazi perpetrators

摘要

Between 1992-1996 I was in charge of a research project in Germany and Israel sponsored by the German Research Association. My colleagues and I examined three generations of Jewish and non-Jewish German and Israeli families. The specific focus of our study lay in comparing different family constellations based on whether the first generation could be categorized as victims, perpetrators, or Nazifollowers during the Nazi period. Primarily from a sociological perspective we examined how family histories that differ biographically after 1945 – in Israel, inWest Germany and in former East Germany – affect the process of transmitting the family past from one generation to the next.We looked at the process of how family history is passed down through the generations in three generations of Jewish and non-Jewish German and Israeli families. The general empirical question was: How do three generations of families live today with the family and the collective past during the Nazi period? What influences does this past of the first generation, and their own ways of dealing with it, have upon the lives of their offspring?