Boundary crossings: Oral history of Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa - A comparative perspective

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 48, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 40-63

  Mouton, Michelle ^a   Pohlandt McCormick, Helena ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 55949132170     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/1999.48.41     Document Type: Review

References (66)

1. We have collected personal accounts of historical periods primarily identified as politically repressive. Confronted in each case with a public or official discourse that attempted to deny, repress, and reinterpret both what happened and why it happened, we are trying to get beyond that to the perspective and experience of individuals. The difference between the projects lies in the nature of the groups we are researching. The first project focuses on women who essentially accommodated to the system, the other explores the experiences of young people who resisted the system.
2. In a different, but no less relevant, context, Heidi Gengenbach has recently and forcefully reiterated this point: . . . the African women they interviewed actively, passionately, intelligently and sometimes stubbornly insisted on telling the story of their life in a particular way, regardless of what their 'Western' interviewer wanted to hear from them. In 'Truth-Telling and the Politics of Women's Life History Research in Africa: A Reply to Kirk Hoppe', International Journal of African Historical Studies 27: 3, 1994, p. 623.
3. Marjorie Shostak describes how Nisa's story of the near-infanticide of her little brother evoked doubt and ambivalence: Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, New York, 1981, (introduction) pp. 29-43. Alessandro Portelli found that in oral narratives of the death of Luigi Trastulli, a 21-year-old steel worker who died in a clash with Terni police, there emerged a 'chronological displacement' of the death from 17 March 1949, when workers walked out of the factory to take part in an anti-NATO rally, to October 1953, when a mass-layoff of steelworkers resulted in street fighting. Rather than dismiss this 'widespread and significant "error"' as the result of 'faulty individual memories', Portelli used the time-shift in the Trastulli story to explore the making of social memory.
4. Alessandro Portelli, 'The Death of Luigi Trastulli: Memory and the Event', in The Death of Luigi Trastulli and other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, Albany, 1991, pp. 1-2 and pp. 13-6.
5. Thanks also to Jean Allman for describing a similar experience: in what Allman first characterized as a 'failed encounter', Akosua Nyameba, the 'number one' woman in the Asante National Liberation Movement's Women's Section, refused to be 'interviewed', explaining at length why she would not be a 'source'. This left Allman with a picture of the Women's Section that 'was rather shadowy, ambiguous . . . - rife with contradictions'. 'Seven years later', Allman revisited this 'one interview that just had not worked', to find that Nyameba, 'wittingly, I suspect, had provided me with a wealth of information on gender and power relations in the NLM.' Nyameba's '"non-interview" - with its multiple, contradictory truths, its authority and marginality, its silences and ambiguities' was the 'catalyst' to a 'process of self-reflection and self-criticism', in which Allman questioned and redefined her methodology and her research agenda. 'The Oral Interview that Wasn't: Reflections on Gender, Politics and Research Methodology in Asante', presented at the Thirty-Third Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Baltimore, Maryland, November 1990, pp. 1-14.
6. Portelli, Trastulli, p. 20.
7. The interactional, situational, and ever-changing character of fieldwork roles and relationships is described in Pierre Hugo (ed.), Truth be in the Field: Social Science Research in Southern Africa, Pretoria, 1990, p. 205.
8. Soweto is the largest black township outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. On 16 June 1976, its school children rebelled against the imposition of Afrikaans, the official language of the white Afrikaner government, as the medium of instruction in secondary schools. Almost immediately, the protest turned into violent insurrection when police opened fire on demonstrators to suppress the protest, leaving 575 dead by the time the uprising ended in February 1977.
9. Our work thus not only attempts to answer Passerini's call for an extension of the issues raised in Memory and Totalitarianism to 'other experiences . . . such as . . . the cultural and psychological effects of Apartheid in South Africa', but also seeks for new understandings that might emerge from the comparative study of memory and totalitarianisms, in this case Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa. Luisa Passerini (ed.), 'Introduction' in Memory and Totalitarianism. International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories, Vol. 1, Oxford, 1992, p. 7.
10. For a 'cult of consensus and authority', see Passerini, 'Introduction,' Memory and Totalitarianism, p. 7.
11. Renate Siebert asserts that for those Germans who were part of Nazism, remembering was either 'concealed under the thick layer of anguish-generated silence that . . . swallowed' the past, or they chose to suppress, or 'to expel disturbing aspects of the past from . . . memory'. See Renate Siebert, 'Fragments of a Negative Tradition', in Memory and Totalitarianism, pp. 166-7, p. 176,
12. and Passerini, 'Introduction', Memory and Totalitarianism, pp. 8-9.
13. This was not always true as F.-J. Brüggemeier has pointed out, 'Sounds of Silents: History, Narrative and Life-Recollections', in Poetics 15, 1986, p. 15.
14. See also Passerini, 'Introduction', Memory and Totalitarianism
15. and Siebert, 'Don't Forget', in Memory and Totalitarianism, pp. 10-11 and pp. 167-8. Furthermore, postwar ideology and political experience led to a divergence in the creation of collective memory in East and West Germany. The research upon which this paper is based focused solely on the West German experience.
16. For a general synopsis of the historiographical debate see Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. 1, New York, 1997.
17. For a discussion of the 'historians' controversy' from the mid-1980s, see Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity, Cambridge, Mass., 1988.
18. A concurrent debate has focused on German women's roles as victims and perpetrators in the Nazi regime. For an overview of this historiographical debate, see for example, Adelheid von Saldern, 'Victims or Perpetrators: controversies about the role of women in the Nazi state', in David Crew (ed.), Nazism and German Society: 1933-1945, London, 1994, pp. 141-65.
19. Frau Schnabel, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Detmold, 28 February 1995. All names have been changed.
20. Dan O'Meara, Forty Lost Years: The Apartheid State and the Politics of the National Party, 1948-1994, Athens, 1996, p. 10.
21. The duration of a totalitarian regime - here four decades as compared to the one of National Socialism, two of Italian Fascism and seven of Stalinism - seems to account for differences in the memories of those who experienced them. The differences are further underscored where successive generations had differing experiences of total domination (those who were born before, during, or after), or where the regime spanned so much time that it erases a 'before' or 'after' for those (of whatever age) who spent their whole lives subject to it. It therefore also matters greatly how much time has passed since the demise of the system, and with what hopes (or fears!) for the future memories are shaped. See also Passerini, Memory and Totalitarianism, pp. 10, 12.
22. Passerini, 'Introduction', Memory and Totalitarianism, p. 7.
23. O'Meara, Forty Lost Years, p. 7.
24. Passerini, 'Introduction', Memory and Totalitarianism, p. 11.
25. Luisa Passerini, 'A Memory for Women's History: Problems of Method and Interpretation', unpublished paper, p. 6.
26. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai (ed.), Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, New York, 1991, pp. 11, 19;
27. Anderson and Jack, 'Learning to Listen: Interview Techniques and Analyses', in Women's Words, pp. 13-7.
28. See also Personal Narratives Group (ed.), Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives, Bloomington, 1989.
29. Among white respondents the demand was more for impartiality. Once my credibility had been established, people spoke freely.
30. John Kotre, White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory, New York, 1995, p. 164.
31. See also Susan Geiger, 'Women's Life Histories: Method and Content', Signs 11: 2, 1986, p. 348.
32. This is not uncommon. Even during the Third Reich many people believed Hitler himself was a good man who would rectify all the wrongs caused by his underlings. Frau Schumacher, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Münster, 25 January 1995.
33. The Nazis sponsored preschools - Kindergärten - that, together with the state youth group, were intended to indoctrinate German youth in National Socialist ideology.
34. The reference here is to the brown Nazi uniforms. Frau Schmitt, interview with the author, tape recording, Detmold, 12 May 1995.
35. Lilli Mokganyetsi, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Johannesburg, 8 December 1993.
36. Frau Kehde, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Lemgo, 21 May 1995.
37. Helena Pohlandt-McCormick was in the 11th grade in South Africa in 1976.
38. At some level Michelle Mouton's position as an outsider - a woman alone in a foreign country - encouraged a warm relationship with narrators. Although such familial relationships are fictive, Susan Geiger rightly points to the benefits of not being considered a stranger and also to the obligations that necessarily accompany this privilege. Susan Geiger, 'What's so Feminist About Doing Women's Oral History?' in Expanding the Boundaries of Women's History, Bloomington, 1992, p. 312. The interviewees may also have felt more comfortable in talking to an American (which set the author apart from German scholars). Anonymity, as well as translation into and publication in English, eliminated the fear that someone would discover their stories.
39. Karen Hagemann also encountered this with the working-class women she interviewed in Hamburg. Karen Hagemann, '"Ich glaub' nicht, daß ich Wichtiges zu erzählen hab':" Oral History and historische Frauenforschung', in Vorländer (ed.), Oral History: Mündlich Erfragte Geschichte, Göttingen, 1990, p. 29.
40. The 'public transcript' describes the 'open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate'. It is a deferential, acquiescent discourse in the presence of the dominant. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven, 1990, p. 2.
41. Frau Anna Peters, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Münster, 12 March 1997, and 23 November 1994.
42. This job required apprenticeship training in Germany and was commonly associated with the intellectual world.
43. This was a Nazi organization created explicitly to provide entertainment, culture, and travel for the working-class. It was also from its inception, inherently political.
44. Most of the interviews were characterized by a lack of critical comment, except for occasional mention of opposition to specific events such as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass.
45. 'You could no longer trust your closest friend' [Man traute dem nächsten Freund nicht mehr], Frau Rohde, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Münster, 21 January 1995.
46. Passerini has also emphasized that 'one risk of qualitative research is, that it becomes very engaging for the subjects involved, and there are no recipes for containing its impact'. Passerini, 'A Memory for Women's History', p. 6.
47. Michael Geyer and John W. Boyer (ed.), Resistance Against the Third Reich, 1933-1990, Chicago, 1992.
48. Scott, Domination, pp. 8, 10.
49. Passerini, 'Introduction', Memory and Totalitarianism, p. 13.
50. Lilli Mokganyetsi, interview.
51. 'Shortly after the shooting, Mr J. H. B. Esterhuizen, a WRAB [West Rand Bantu Administration] official, drove along Pela Street in a motor vehicle belonging to the Board. It is not known where he was going, nor is it clear whether the name of the Board was painted on the vehicle. Almost directly opposite the Phomolong clinic, the rioting scholars threw stones at the vehicle and one large stone shattered the windscreen. Some of these scholars were identified as pupils of the MIHS [Morris Isaacson High School]. Ten or so youths dragged Mr Esterhuizen from his car and assaulted him for about three minutes. He was struck with stones and sticks, and left for dead on the ground. Three students fetched a rubbish bin from a house and emptied out hot ash onto him. This is why it was found at the inquest that an attempt had been made to burn his body. A report in a Johannesburg morning newspaper on the 17th read that they had thrown the body into the bin and that some of them had said: "That is where he belongs".' Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Riots at Soweto and Elsewhere from the 16th of June 1976 to the 28th of February 1977, Pretoria, 1980, pp. 123-4.
52. Karl Figlio, 'Oral History and the Unconscious', History Workshop Journal 26, 1988, p. 120.
53. Portelli, Trastulli, p. 105.
54. Passerini, 'Introduction', Memory and Totalitarianism, p. 13.
55. John Kotre, White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory, New York, 1995, p. 150,
56. and Daniel L. Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past, New York, 1996, p. 93.
57. See Portelli, Trastulli, pp. 1-26.
58. Frau Neske, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Detmold, 9 February 1995.
59. Siebert, 'Don't Forget', p. 166.
60. Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War, New York, 1979,
61. cited in Passerini, 'Introduction', Memory and Totalitarianism, p. 13.
62. Passerini has called this 'wounds in the tissue of memory' and Selma Leydesdorff writes of 'shattered' memories. Passerini, 'Introduction', Memory and Totalitarianism
63. and Leydesdorff, 'A Shattered Silence: The Life Stories of Survivors of the Jewish Proletariat of Amsterdam', in Memory and Totalitarianism, pp. 13, 147.
64. Lutz Niethammer and Passerini have a slightly different version of this: '. . . the actual perception must have been far more complex before the observer settled on one particular perspective, and established it in the niche of his memory': Passerini, 'Introduction', Memory and Totalitarianism;
65. and Niethammer, 'Where Were You on 17 June? A Niche in Memory', in Memory and Totalitarianism, pp. 13, 54.
66. Scott, Domination, p. 8.