Post-war memories and silences within families: Why micro hesitations matter

Abstract

This article is part of a special issue on Micro-Memories. The article analyses a short strip of interaction, which concerns a 3-minute fragment of a 60-year-old Belgian woman talking about her deceased father’s past as a Nazi collaborator. The analysis is anchored in philosophy and political sciences. It is divided into two main sections. The first highlights a general sense of confusion that characterizes most of the answers given by the interviewee about her father’s past. The study takes the inconsistency of her posture as the starting point for reflecting on how we remember after a war. To do so, it questions the link between two fundamental dynamics in memory studies: the “weight of the past” (concerned with the traces left by the past on the present) and the “choice of the past” (which refers to its strategic uses). The second section underlines the features of the intergenerational transmission of memories in the family observed here. It emphasizes the critical role played by the third generation in memory transmission and the lack of relevance of the false/true dichotomy in this specific context. Despite its shortness, the initial interview underscores the intricate role of the family in the decision to attribute—or, in this case, not to attribute—meaning to the past. The succession of silences and interrupted sentences express the multitude of gray zones about the war. The conclusion raises a general question about closure after political violence. In choosing not to explore further her father’s involvement during the war, the interviewee attempts to deal with a past that is not her own but is nevertheless a part of her identity. In such circumstances, how can descendants draw a line between the past and the present?