Grandpa Wasn't a Nazi

Harald Welzer, a sociologist and social psychologist, has carried out research on group violence that enriches our understanding of the individual psychic mechanisms that make it possible. This uncompromising work and the subtlety of his analysis of the discourse of those who were actors in National Socialism, or in other massacres or genocides, are rich in lessons. Three books bear witness to this work: Les Exécuteurs, des hommes normaux aux meurtriers de masse (Perpetrators: From Ordinary Men to Mass Murderers) (Gallimard 2007), Soldats, combattre, tuer, mourir (Soldiers: On Fighting, Killing and Dying) (Gallimard 2013), and “Grandpa Wasn’t a Nazi.”

The methods that Welzer uses, with his two co-authors, in “Grandpa Wasn’t a Nazi” — the way in which he analyzes the discourse of three generations (that of “perfectly ordinary” Germans who were enrolled in Nazism, that of the children, and that of the grandchildren) — interrogate, in a very fine-grained way, the mechanisms and modalities of the transmission of major historical events within families and the way in which a reconstruction of the family history is carried out across several generations.

“Grandpa Wasn’t a Nazi” arises from a research project in which both family interviews with three generations (that of those who took part in the Nazi regime, their children, their grandchildren) and individual interviews with these different generations are conducted. By means of these interviews, the researchers study the processes by which the family history surrounding National Socialism is reconstructed for these three generations, through their dialogue and the dialogue with the researcher who conducts the interview (whose counter-transference is also taken into account in the study).

Beyond the factual conclusion of this study (there is no Nazi in our own family, even though those who took part in this research had been enrolled in National Socialism at the level of the first generation¹), what is most interesting are the modalities by which the family history is constructed in the intergenerational dialogue that make such a conclusion possible. For these modalities can be found in other contexts as well.

In the course of forty family interviews and one hundred forty-two interviews centered on the stories lived and transmitted within the family from the National Socialist past, the authors observed that “a not insignificant number of them are modified in passing from one generation to the next: antisemites turn into resistance fighters, and Gestapo officials take on the status of protectors of Jews.” In certain cases where the first generation spoke, in the course of the family interviews, of the murders they committed and of accounts of executions, these leave no trace in the individual interviews with the children or grandchildren. The latter, thanks to various mechanisms of reconstruction of the family history, transform their parents or grandparents into “good, upstanding people.”

The book as a whole describes in detail, and thanks to a very fine-grained analysis of the family and individual interviews, the mechanisms (unconscious, semi-conscious, inevitable) that make such transformations possible. What interests the authors is the effect produced “by what was said in the process of intergenerational transmission” and the “way in which the stories transform themselves in passing from one generation to the next, to the point of taking on a wholly new meaning at the end of the chain of transmission, the parents and grandparents being presented as heroes of everyday resistance, even though the story told by them gives no grounds whatsoever to think so.” Gradually, in the thread of transmission, there also emerges the fact that the grandparents or the parents were victims.²

The authors drew above all on work on family memory as their theoretical foundation — for example that of Maurice Halbwachs. Such memory is founded on “the fiction of a canonized family history,” always made of fragments reconstructed from one generation to the next. What also interests the authors is the way in which, over the course of the family interviews, a text is created that is jointly composed by the various participants (including the one conducting the interview). The authors’ observation about this common text is very interesting: the participants have, before, during, and after the interview, differing conceptions and versions of the past, but within the framework of the family interview and the situation of remembrance, there are created what the authors call “communicative solutions” that allow all the participants to have the feeling of having spoken together about the same thing.

In the process of reconstructing the family history over the course of the family interviews, I was particularly interested in:

• the way in which an event, sometimes anecdotal, sometimes not, recounted by the generation that experienced National Socialism, is reinterpreted in a totally different way by the descendants, or even by the one conducting the interview — an interpretation that contradicts that of the person who lived through it.
• the way in which a story recounted by the first generation, in a nebulous manner, with its gaps and the possibility left to each person to fill them as they please, makes it possible to conclude that the forebear was guilty of nothing, or even acted humanely, without any of the interlocutors questioning the contradictions, the paradoxes, the erasure of significant details over the course of this reconstruction.
• the unrepresentable, for the following generations, of the acts of their forebears and the impossibility of hearing what the parents or grandparents did, even when the latter recount it. “The listeners to the accounts given by the grandparents can listen without hearing what is said… This leads to an interpretation of the account that is totally foreign to, or even opposed to, the grandparents’ original testimony.” This process, according to the authors, is favored by the educational and memorial work done by the German state for the following generations and by their knowledge of the history of National Socialism, which gives rise to the need to attribute to their forebear “the role of the good one.” It is, the authors say, “a paradoxical consequence of the success of the educational work on the Nazi past.”

The analysis of the interviews also shows the importance of the social and the political within the psychic, within transmission, and within the reconstruction of the family history:

• In two thirds of cases, two mechanisms make it possible to absolve the forebear with respect to his National Socialist past: “cumulative heroization” and his victimization (in relation to the Russians, the Allies, the Nazis who forced him to enroll, in relation to the bombings, the rationing, etc.). These mechanisms rest, the authors say, on the construction of a social image in which “the Nazis” and “the Germans” gradually become two different groups of people (the Germans being the group that was seduced and deceived). They also rest, the authors say, on the disappearance of the historical and political element constituted by the Shoah and National Socialism, as though what is borne today were the image of a crime against humanity that is increasingly de-historicized, much like the image of National Socialism itself.
• What is still more troubling and more interesting is the way in which, in the interviews, the construction of the role of victim across the generations rests on the images and the history of the Shoah, which are used to the benefit of the representation of the suffering of the German victims. These images, as the work of Brink cited by the authors underscores, have become “icons of destruction” that can be integrated into totally different contexts. And so, into these stories in which the Germans become the victims. These icons are what the authors call “passe-partout.” I quote them: > “we see emerging an evolution in which the Shoah is, in a general way, the narrative model for any form of story in which it is a question of victims and executioners […] A story of victims will appear all the more plausible for resting on this narrative schema. Our interviews show that […] Non-Jewish Germans take on a pioneering role in the adaptation of this narrative model when they turn themselves into victims of the National Socialist regime and of the period that followed it.”
• In the same way, the authors note that the interviews are traversed by the traces of media images of the National Socialist period (in particular fictional films) and that these traces are integrated into the autobiographical experience that they help to create, or that they are used in the perception and interpretation of the family history under Nazism. These traces were most often implicit for the persons interviewed.

A book to read absolutely, and of immediate relevance to the political and social questions we face today. Yes, a book that shows that the work of memory and reparation carried out by the state has nothing to do with the reality of families, of real people…

Notes