Collective experiences, intergenerational memory and identity constructions in Luxembourg: witnesses of World War II, peasants, industrial workers, immigrants
Following the work on lieux de mémoire au Luxembourg , memory research is further pursued at the Laboratoire de Recherche en Histoire at Luxembourg University in the context of a project on specific collective experiences and their handing down from one generation to the next. We concentrate on four “fields of recollection” that would seem to be constitutive for Luxembourg identity: 1. the Second World War and the occupation by Nazi Germany, 2. the social and economic changes agriculture and the rural world have undergone in the 20th century, 3. the socio-economic developments in the realm of the steal industry, 4. the experiences related to immigration (esp. from Italy and Portugal) to Luxembourg.
Our interest is directed to the memory processes in the family, that is, the way the experiences and memories of the historical witnesses become part of the social memory through family tradition, and to the changes and developments the memories undergo during these communicative processes.
The project is linked to the work of the Center for Interdisciplinary Memory Research (CIMR, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen) on memories of war in Germany and the comparative endeavours which followed on an international scale. The cooperation with the CIMR reveals itself on the conceptual and methodological plan: here, as there, empirical investigation concentrates on “three-generation-families” and the interview texts are subjected to a hermeneutic analysis which is based on a method developed by Harald Welzer. In contrast to the studies conducted so far, the Luxembourg project tries to apply the conceptual and methodological approach to fields of recollection that do not constitute prominent elements of the public memory culture. We thus look at social groups – peasants, steal-workers, immigrants – whose historical consciousness and contribution to social memory have hitherto been more or less neglected.
