Traditions of Historical Consciousness (completed)

Funded by Volkswagen Stiftung

The project “Traditions of Historical Consciousness” aimed to achieve a deeper understanding of how the representations of the “Third Reich” enter the collective memory and the ways in which the interpretative patterns are handed down from one generation to the next. Its most striking outcomes are presented in the book “Opa war kein Nazi” by Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller and Karoline Tschuggnall.

The project commenced in October of 1997 and is conducted through the Institute of Psychology at the University of Hanover. Funding has been provided until September 2000 by the Volkswagen Foundation. The qualitative research is comprised of interviews with three generations from forty German families. Interviews had been conducted with the members of each generation as well as group discussions amongst the three generations of each family. The members of the families were asked to recount their lived and narrated experiences from the “Third Reich”. The interviews provide material to represent what Germans remember about this time, as well as presenting their selection process in the material they choose to hand down from one generation to the next.

The younger generations become enmeshed in these pasts through cultural and communicative methods of transference. The project identified these modes of transference through the analysis of the interview transcripts. Analyses of the interviews combine hermeneutic and content analytic methods. The content analysis is assisted by the software-tool WinMAX. The interdisciplinary approach draws on theoretical and methodological concepts in social and cultural psychology, life history research and oral history.