Relating to the Distant Past : Routes of Memory of Women Concentration-Camp Survivors

• Authors: Šárka Kadlecová
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Personal stories and testimonies of survivors of Nazi concentration camps contributed to the construction of the Holocaust and Nazi genocide as a shared European realm of memory. A variety of individual memories of a certain event contribute to the creation of its collective representation which is then accessible for a wider range of people. This article deals with social dimensions of memory and trauma. It focuses on the engagement of individuals in the memory work related to traumatic past, particularly to the experience of Ravensbrück concentration camp. It examines the processes of remembering and meaning-construction in public and private contexts. The objective is to identify the routes of memory and the impacts on memory transmission in different spaces and temporalities. Ethnographic methods were deployed to investigate processes of remembering in witnesses, women-concentration-camp survivors from various European countries, and the relation to the past familial experience in descendant

Keywords

EN

collective memory; communicative memory; cultural memory; trauma; remembering

Discipline

• ETHNOLOGY: ETHNOLOGY

• Publisher: Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Český lid: etnologický časopis (Český lid: Ethnological journal)
• Year: 2017
• Volume: 104
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 473-494
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Šárka Kadlecová

• Český lid, redakce, Etnologický ústav AV ČR, v.v.i., Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Praha 1, Czech Republic