Abstract
This dissertation studies the histories, experiences, and identities of the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and the grandchildren of Holocaust perpetrators—the so-called “third generations”—in Austria, Germany, and the United States. It focuses on how these grandchildren learned about their family history, how and why they choose to explore this past on their own terms, and the effects of these experiences on their worldviews and senses of self. This dissertation intentionally examines the grandchildren of survivors and grandchildren of perpetrators side-by-side and argues that despite these grandchildren’s different and even opposing family histories, they have been taught about and seek out further details on their family histories in similar ways. As grandchildren explore their family histories in such parallel manners, they also make sense of their experiences similarly on emotional and intellectual levels. The third generation is a particularly important group to examine now because they are typically the last generation to have had a formative relationship with the generation of witnesses to the Holocaust. As there are fewer witnesses and witnesses’ children left, grandchildren are often seen, by themselves and by others, as responsible for carrying on their family history and the history of the Holocaust and the Third Reich. This perspective of grandchildren is apparent because we are currently in a moment—and have been already for a decade or so—in which grandchildren’s cultural production, including fictional novels, memoirs, films, podcasts, artworks, has proliferated immensely.
Previous scholarship has established the significance of understanding the experiences of the second and third postwar generations. However, much of the existing scholarship that compares these sets of grandchildren was written before they became more conspicuous groups in the early 2000s. As a result, these works did not discuss the importance of grandchildren coming of age and more witnesses passing away because these factors were not as relevant at the time. Also, many works that discuss these grandchildren separately rely on frameworks used to describe the children of witnesses and on the content of fictional cultural productions. This dissertation adds to the existing literature by examining the third generation’s history, as a group and as individuals, and building frameworks based on grandchildren’s accounts of their experiences.
As such, based on the analysis of interviews, memoirs, films, and archival documentation, this dissertation considers how grandparents and parents communicated the past to grandchildren and how grandchildren attempted to experience the past by initiating encounters with the “other side,” traveling to sites relevant to their grandparents’ pasts and the Holocaust, and considering the possibility of postwar justice through trials of perpetrators and revenge. These experiences reveal modes of remembrance that are significant to the current—and potentially future—generations. More broadly, this dissertation suggests that several generations later, there might be universal methods of relating to difficult family histories regardless of which side of the history one’s family was on. Ultimately, this dissertation is about how history is passed down within families, who engages in remembrance, why they do so, what they choose to remember and forget, and how they use this history in their present.