Page 463 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo II

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This phenomenon was researched by the German social psychologists Harald Welzer,
Sabine Moller and Caroline Tschuggnall who worked on the family memories in behalf
of the national socialist past. They interviewed children and grandchildren of ordinary
Germans who had been part of the National Socialist society. To their big surprise they
found out that during the process of retelling the grandparents’ stories within the fami-
lies, (Erzählgemeinschaften) the stories got more and more consistent and enriched with
more and more details. Also the figures of grandpa and grandma changed: in the stories
retold they became more and more like heroes who had resisted the National socialist
regime. Welzer, Moller and Tschuggnall speak therefore of “cumulative heroization” as
a narrative trend in the stories and the family memory.
The reasons for this shift lie, as the three authors write, in the general wish to see
grandpa and grandma as morally upright persons (like the ones they knew from the mov-
ies and T.V.) not as brutal Nazi perpetrators, and therefore they grab just those elements
in their stories that can be re-ordered in a (popular available) narrative of resistance. The
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constant and emotion-stirring retelling of these stories consolidates these narratives. In
later articles Harald Welzer made sure that these features of remembering and retelling
stories are also accountable, when the story is remembered and retold only by the one
who has experienced it. The explanation behind this is that the story-teller is to some
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extent aware of the expectations of his (imagined) audience which are also his own ones.
Therefor, as the (grand-)children in the family memory, he grabs only those fragments
from his own story that fit these (self-)expectations when he is recalling and re-telling it,
thus re-constructing it once again, but in a given direction.
Coming back to my so-called German sources we can assume that the constant re-
telling about experienced sexual violence within the mentioned political setting was sub-
jected to the same dynamics. In accordance with Welzer, Moller and Tschuggnall I would
therefore call the narrative trend in German sources on rape “cumulative victimization”.

* * * *

The opposite result but within the same mechanisms can be found in testimonies that
were made accessible by the Visual History Archive of the US Shoah Foundation and
the Online Archive for Forced Work by the German fond of “Remembrance, Responsi-
bility, Future”, the Free University Berlin and the German Historical Museum Berlin –
which make up the second set of sources in this paper: Memories by so-called displaced
women. Both oral history projects were established in the 1990ies. They collected and
videotaped 52000 respectively 600 interviews with former victims of the racist politics
of the Third Reich and put them online.
Obviously, the main focus of the interviews is not on rape by Red Army soldiers.
Nevertheless, the respondents speak in several cases about “liberator sexual assaults”
which is in the Visual History Archive a key-word on its own and gets 522 hits. The

21 Welzer, Moller, Tschuggnall, Opa
22 Harald Welzer: Die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit – Geschichte als Arena der Politik, [The presence of the
past – history as an arena of politics] in: Osteuropa 2005: 55, 9–18.