Mother and friends in a Holocaust life story

Abstract

Although oral histories about the Holocaust are increasingly important sources of public commemoration, as well as data for historians, they also provide opportunities for survivors to recount life stories that describe intensely personal and painful memories. One type of memory concerns relationships with significant and familiar “others.” By analyzing the linguistic construction (through variation in the use of referring terms and reported speech) of two relationships (with mother and friends) in one Holocaust survivor's life story, this article shows how survivors' life stories position “others” within both their own lives and more broadly construed matrices of cultural archetypes and historically contingent identities (victim, survivor, bystander).

Implicit and explicit identity constructions in the life story of one of Hitler's elite soldiers

“…Furthermore, in these data we clearly see an example of the influence of time and its complex relationship with a life story as was discussed by Schiffrin (2002). After having lived in the mind of the storyteller for many years, the story has ripened into a multi-layered version of past events that were once experienced by the interviewee and that have matured over the years, being nurtured by events of the current times until the moment of storytelling.…”

Interpreting reported speech in witnesses’ evidence

“…However, following Bakhtin (1981), most discourse analysts see reported speech as an appropriation of another's words and a transformation of the original utterance (e.g. Tannen 1986Tannen , 1989Schiffrin 2002). Tannen (1986Tannen ( , 1989 uses the term 'constructed dialogue' instead of reported speech because speakers often do not report verbatim, and Mayes (1990: 354) points to the popular fallacy that DRS is more factual or reliable than IRS.…”

We Knew That’s It: Retelling the Turning Point of a Narrative

“…Despite these functional similarities, changes in the mode of evaluation, from concrete/internal to abstract/external, suggest that the story of the capture has also become a performative narrative. In Schiffrin (2002), I suggested that some oral history narratives show signs of frequent telling, not just through their introductions, performance features, and mode of delivery, but because they present characters, and construct plots, that seem designed for a broad audience with little background knowledge about the Holocaust.…”