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Description
How do families 'reminisce' about the experience of war and flight?
In this presentation, Professor Alexander Freund looks at interviews with members of three families who experienced state violence and displacement in the wake of the Second World War. Two of the three refugees (men born in Central Europe between 1928 and 1936) were interviewed in Winnipeg, Canada, in 1978 and 1989, respectively. In order to help understand how memories and stories change over long personal, familial, and historical time periods, the two men were re-interviewed in 2012/13.
Professor Freund then interviewed some of their children and grandchildren to help gain a better understanding of how stories of war and flight had been transferred across—and negotiated among—generations. These artificially 're-constructed', partial family memories were characterised by sparse interaction, silences, unspoken assumptions, and imagined memories. Later generations added new details and re-interpreted their elders’ stories to better fit their own lives.
Such findings raise more questions: What exactly is 'family memory'? What kind of a 'family memory' is this—or is it 'family memory' at all? How can we use such memories for our study of history, the history of memory, and the historical role of memory in society?
Speaker Bios
Alexander Freund is a Professor of History at the University of Winnipeg, where he holds the Chair in German-Canadian Studies and serves as the Director of the Oral History Centre. A native of Germany and immigrant to Canada, Freund has been focusing on the transatlantic, especially German-North American, history of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.