Boundary Crossings: Oral History of Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa – a Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Oral history can reveal how memory and imagination generate historical knowledge in an effort to make sense of the personal experience of historical events. Many things shape memory: for instance the circumstances of the remembering, the time between the event and the telling, and the age of the narrator both then and now. Another influence on memory, less well understood, is the socio-political context of experience, in particular the way in which revisions of a nation's historical memory may compel individuals to repress or alter their private memories. Using oral narratives of the Nazi period in Germany and the Apartheid era in South Africa respectively, we tried to recover the subjective popular experiences of social change wrought within living memory.1 The stories we heard during our research were filtered through the past and present experiences of their narrators. They turned around silences and censorship, around minute, almost insignificant episodes, and around decisive experiences. We were struck by the tension that emerged between the present and past historical political context in which these stories are embedded and the private personal experiences of our respondents. As we compared our fieldwork notes, it became apparent that for both of us there were disturbing moments in the interviews, when tensions arose from something uncomfortable, shocking, or offensive. Although the interviews followed common lines, some were more marked by their narrators' obvious attempts to manipulate them. Beyond this, in some the normal narrative broke down, a boundary was crossed and the narrative ruptured into something atypical. The significance of such moments, however rare, continued to puzzle us as we wrestled with the challenge of transforming the stories we were told into history. Despite the narrators' active part in telling and remembering their life histories,2 what we found then seemed to go beyond the narrator's conventional story, beyond what the narrator thought she was telling us, and beyond the questions set by our research agendas. We believe that such moments in the interview process itself, which we will call boundary crossings or ruptures in the narrative, reveal oral history's potential to