The Suffering of the Perpetrators in North American Kriegskinder Memoirs of WW

In the past two decades, numerous memoirs by the last living generation of Germans who experienced World War Two as Kriegskinder – war children – have been emerging not only in Germany and other German-speaking nations but also in North America. Written in English by German immigrants and typically published by small publishers or self-published, these North American memoirs participate in the controversial topic of German wartime victimization often at the expense of issues of German perpetration. Borrowing from childhood, autobiography, and migration studies, this talk explores how the figure of the child that emerges in these texts is highly politicized and attempts to legitimize through the tropes of innocence and resilience a narrative of German suffering that can withstand charges of historical relativism and revisionism so frequently evoked by attempts to convey the perpetrators’ traumas.

Event Sponsor
Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Anjoli Roy, 956-3774, biograph@hawaii.edu

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