Harald Welzer is my favourite social psychologist. A 42 pages summary of his book Grandpa Wasn't a Nazi: The Holocaust in German Family Remembrance (2002) is available as free pdf file from the American Jewish Committee.
ajc.org: "Prof. Harald Welzer, director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Memory Research at the Insti-tute for Cultural Studies in Essen (Germany), suggests that what is learned cognitively is not always absorbed into the heart. Welzer interviewed forty Western and Eastern German families, both in a family setting and individually, to discover how they interpreted their objective knowledge of the history of the Third Reich in terms of their own family history. He found that the history transmitted through intergenerational conversation was quite dif-ferent from the textbook history of the Holocaust period. Almost all the younger Germans interviewed believed that their own grandparents had not been involved or had opposed the racist policies of Nazism. Even when grandparents admitted their participation in Nazi crimes, their offspring did not “hear” them or reinterpreted the stories in ways that turned their forebears into heroes." Download here
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