Memory and Agency

MEMORY IS NOT ONLY MANIFEST in media representations, political discussions, and autobiographical interpretations of the past but also expressed and formed in complex memory activities initiated and carried out by returnees. In this chapter I examine the ways in which individual returnees, alone and in groups, interacted and dealt with their past by developing various forms of memory activities. In order to pursue these activities, returnees acted in both institutionalized and non-institutionalized social frameworks, as members of (self-created) memory communities, and within various other communicative contexts. Taking up the perspective of individuals and their specific memory activities and projects as former POWs and returnees, I emphasize the individual agency and subjectivity of returnees in constructing memory by also taking into account the social, cultural, and political conditions that shape, determine, and limit individual agency. In a direct sense, memory is explored here as the outcome of specific forms of social interaction.

Through their memory activities, returnees created memory communities and networks, through which they responded to and participated in political discourses and social developments. In order to construct these memory networks, they interacted with each other and with potential audiences, and they propagated their individual memory activities, for instance via the media, particularly local and regional media. I therefore explore the manifold ways in which returnees used institutional and organizational frameworks for individual memory activities and how they attempted to locate themselves in local and group-specific memory discourses. This contributes to understanding how private and public, individual and collective forms of memory intersect and how they are interwoven at various levels. The analyses demonstrate the existence of a fascinating complexity and variety of memory projects even below the threshold of public attention.

In West Germany before reunification and in reunified Germany, the most influential and important collective memory agent for these kinds of memory projects on the institutionalized meso-level was the VdH, which was engaged in various memory projects from its formation in 1950 until its dissolution in 2006. Its significance with respect to the memory activities discussed in this chapter is threefold. The VdH itself acted as a collective memory agent, which erected memorials commemorating war captivity and the return from captivity, and organized joint trips to former camp sites.