Childhood memories from behind the barbed wire: The legacy of German American internment during World War II

The objective of this phenomenological study is to examine the lived experiences of the now-grown children of interned German Americans in the United States during World War II. As the phenomenon of European internment in America is not well known, this project was designed not only to study the experience of German Americans, but to provide a scholarly forum for those remaining to describe its impact in their own voices. Five individuals volunteered to participate in the project by providing their own stories in the form of a recorded and transcribed interview. The content of the interview focused on each grown child's view of his or her experience of political marginalization, apprehension, and detention. Each participant represents a portion of the entire phenomenon and serves to highlight the essential issues which appear across the entire spectrum. The individual stories have been consolidated and woven into one story representative of the internment and exclusion which took place within the German American community after December 7, 1941. From the collected data there emerged five salient and recurrent emotional themes which were experienced to varying degrees by all the participants: Anger, Fear, Denial, Shame, and Resolve. These resonating themes provided deeper insights into the psychological elements necessary for survival, adaptation, and reintegration after the end of the war.;As a further gesture to Clark Moustakas (1990), whose work forms the basis for much of this study, a screenplay for a short black-and-white film is included. The film is a representation of the events of one night, as seen through the eyes of a small child in the hours after a father had been apprehended from his home by the FBI.;After more than a half century, the shadow of internment remains. The narratives in this study are presented with the hope that they will provide historical perspective for future generations facing similar challenges in the complicated global climate of the 21st century.