‘Hiding on a Glass Roof’,or a Commentator’s Exercise on ‘Rewriting Memories’

Abstract

Tschuggnall and Welzer’s (2002) paper provides examples of narratives collected in interviews about the Third Reich period in Germany. They discuss the transformations observed in recounted episodes as they are passed from one generation to the other in the theoretical framework of collective and constructive memory. While agreeing with the paper’s main tenets, the commentary offers further readings of the stories presented as evidence, suggesting also a deeper analytic treatment of the conversational unfolding of the sequences. Recurring themes in the stories recalled by witnesses and their relatives are read as reflexively indexing the interview setting and, more widely, as negotiation over the past across generations with different cultural backgrounds and moral orientations.

Keywords

conversational storytelling evaluation genre interview methodology reflexivity

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