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EN
In 2004 the North America Letter Collection (Nordamerika-Briefsammlung) received an extraordinary letter series consisting of 202 letters written by 19 different authors, all members of a large transatlantic family network (Bohn family). They wrote to each other beginning in the mid-19th century after four out of five children had immigrated to the United States. Letters were written to family members in Germany and between family members in the United States settling in different places. Drawing on this unique collection as well as on two volume family history written by the American amateur historian in 1982 and interviews with family members conducted in 2004 and 2006, the paper reconstructs the memory of transatlantic family, spanning the life experience of seven generations. The analysis sheds light on how history and memory are intertwined. It also demonstrates that Bohm family’s history and identity is the outcome of the interplay of the social construction of individual memories and its continuous reproduction in the form of stories told and histories written as a means of creating family cohesiveness in a very diverse and spatially scattered and thus separated social environment.
EN
The early 1980s were characterized by a paradigm change in history. The premises, research methods and research goals of the dominant paradigm of "social and structural history" were challenged by the “subjective turn” in history contesting the logocentrist and linear way of historical thinking, the established techniques of history writing and the systems of historical knowledge production. The emerging new fields of research and research approaches – oral history, life histories, historical anthropology and history and memory – were closely interconnected, methodologically and with regard to their theoretical foundations. Going back to some of the arguments put forward in the discussion about the linguistic turn in the 1980s, I will argue that in order to be able to "read" and understand immigrant letters historians have to approach them as "texts" and not just as illustrative historical source material. It is necessary to not only look at content but also at the way the content is presented, i.e. the narration and the narrative structure of the letters. In order to elucidate the methodological bridging function of these two approaches and their contribution to overcome the micro-macro divide, I will in a first step contextualize the specific theoretical value of life history research by putting it in the context of arguments developed by historical anthropology. In a second step, I will apply the developed research framework to reconstruct the structural properties and historical sequences of life course processes as represented by the narratives of the letters of Ernst and Marie Kuchenbecker written between 1891 and 1932.
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