Spoken memory: Oral history, the Holocaust, and Germany's search for meaning

In Germany's postwar era a struggle emerged in incorporating National Socialism and the Holocaust into German history, memory, and public discussion. After 1945, it would take years before Germans would commemorate the Holocaust and the victims of the Nazis on a national level, a consequence of the weariness that emerged among Germans after facing the pressures and guilt in their involvement of National Socialism during Hitler's reign. Though vast scholarship exists on this topic, the oral histories of Germans and German Jews holds the ability to provide new insight in exploring the long-term affects of Nazism on both Germans and Jews. By utilizing first hand accounts of those who lived in Germany during World War II and the Holocaust, scholars give narrators authority in contributing their stories to the historiography of this era and reveal how it has affected both German and Jewish identity, the German-Jewish relationships after Nazism fell, and how their children can incorporate this past into their own search for meaning in being German in the wake of inheriting their parent's past.