Memories of nazism and war in two generations of Germans´s descendants repatriated to Brazil

Abstract

The article explores life stories of two interviewees, mother and son, who together experienced the emigration to Germany in 1938 in the context of the repression of the Nazi Party in South Brazil, the Second World War II in Germany– bombing, evacuation, fligth of the Soviet zone – and the repatriation to Brazil in 1946/47. However, both apprehend these events and the participation of the husband and father, respectively, in the national socialism in different ways and sometimes contradictory. Through this case study, we discuss the problem of memory reconstruction in two generations, based on the notion of “communicative memory” formulated by Jan Assmann and developed by the social psychologist Harald Welzer and his team in their study about the national-socialism and the holocaust in the familiar memory.

Keywords: oral history; memory; generation; nazism; World War II