Gabriele Rosenthal

9:10 Lecture 3 September 1999

Transgenerational Consequences of Nazi Crimes and their Denial

Daughters, sons and also grandchildren suffer considerably from the involvement in or impact of the Holocaust experienced by members of their families. But not only this past weighs heavily on their biographies. The burden of the past is being reinforced by the aggressive denial of experienced crimes and by the mechanism of transferring guilt to someone else. In my talk, I will go into this way of dealing with the Nazi-past and its painful impact on descendants, taking visitors of the exhibition on the Wehrmacht as an example.

Gabriele Rosenthal, Dr. rer. soc., Priv.-Doz. was born in 1954 in Schwenningen/Neckar, Germany. She studied sociology and psychology. From 1980-1989, she worked as a researcher and assistent professor in the departments of sociology at the universities of Berlin and Bielefeld. Since 1989, she has held visiting lectureships at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel. 1993, she qualified as a professor in sociology at the University of Kassel. 1992 - 1996, she was responsible for a research project sponsored by the DFG in Germany and Israel, about the Holocaust in three generations. Presently, she is a professor for sociology at the University of Cologne. Her special fields of research include interpretative sociology, biographical research, qualitative methods, sociology of families, social therapy. Her publications include: "Wenn alles in Scherben fällt..." Von Leben und Sinnwelt der Kriegsgeneration. Opladen (1987) (Live and the World of Meanings of the War Generation); Erlebte und erzählte Lebensgeschichte. Gestalt und Struktur bio-graphischer Selbstbeschreibungen. Frankfurt a. M (1995)(Lived and Narrated Live Histories. The Structure of Biographical Descriptions of the Self); Der Holocaust im Leben von drei Generationen. Familien von Überlebenden der Shoah und von Nazi-Tätern. Gießen (1997); The Holocaust in Three Generations: Families of Victims and Perpetrators of the Nazi Regime. London/Washington 1998.