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| Harald Welzer Harald Welzer is director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Memory Research at Essen and research professor of social psychology at the University of Witten/Herdecke in Germany. He spoke at MARIAL in 2005 about his research on how families talk about the Nazi period in Germany. The project “Transmitting Historical Awareness” involved interviews with forty Western and Eastern German families. The whole family was interviewed together, and then separate interviews were done with at least one member each of the eyewitness, children, and grandchildren generations in the family. Welzer talked about how history is formed and transmitted through conversations among the generations, how anti-Jewish stereotypes are similarly passed down, and how Germans interpret the roles of their parents or grandparents in the Third Reich. Welzer said there are “huge gaps between public and private memories” of the Nazi era in Germany. His research shows that each generation makes its own sense of the stories passed down in their families, but “nobody is willing to tell the truth” about what happened during the Third Reich. In many cases, he found that families denied that their relatives committed atrocities, even though historical records indicated otherwise.
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