Memories of the Second World War: Which ones survive?

What memories do the people who lived through the Second World War pass on to their children and grandchildren? Two UCL researchers studied several Belgian families to find out.

The humanities and social sciences address questions of intergenerational memory. Olivier Luminet and Aurélie Vanderhaegen, researchers at the UCL Psychological Sciences Research Institute, led a team that included researchers from the City University of New York and the New School for Social Research in a study of French-speaking Belgian families’ memories of events in Belgium during the war.

Why the Second World War? ‘When we ask any adult sample population to cite the most important events of the last 50 to 100 years,’ explains Olivier Luminet, FNRS Research Director at the UCL Psychological Sciences Research Institute, ‘they tend to mention events that occurred when they were between 15 and 25 years old, that is, during their adolescence and passage to adulthood.’ There is one exception. ‘Everyone, no matter what their age, also cites the Second World War.’

Three generations

‘Scant research exists on intergenerational transmission—the relating of memories between generations’, Mr Luminet explains. ‘Our methodology is inspired by a 2005 study of German families whose grandparents were Nazis. We recruited five French-speaking Belgian families and, based simply on availability, interviewed face-to-face one member of each family’s three generations—grandparents, children, grandchildren. The only condition was that the member of the oldest generation had to be born no later than 1936.’ Each interviewee was asked to relay memories and information according to three main topics related to the war and specific to Belgium: rationing, bombing, collaboration and the ‘royal question’.

Researchers asked interviewees to identify the source of the memory or information in order to determine whether it was a ‘personal’ memory tied to experience or acquired through communication and language (during family discussion, for example), or knowledge tied to ‘national’ memory belonging to the culture as a whole and related by media, school, history books or the arts. Depending on the memory source, researchers reflected on a possible preference for a type of memory and whether this type differed from one generation to another. Another question was the degree to which each of these memory types was passed on to the next generation.

A significant knowledge gap

Following their analyses, the UCL researchers observed weak intergenerational transmission of war memories and a significant knowledge gap between the three generations regarding the four topics. For example, on collaboration, grandparents told the longest stories, at 1,200 words, compared to their children’s 400 words and their grandchildren’s 200.

On the royal question, differences are even more explicit: the grandchildren knew nothing about it. The grandparents didn’t relate their knowledge to the younger generations and the total amount of reported knowledge on the subject is very low. Also, while the children of those who witnessed the war still relate the latter’s memories, it’s no longer the case with the youngest generation. The role of family ‘memories’ diminishes severely through the generations.

To each generation its own memory?

Researchers noted that the grandparents, who lived through the war, consistently recall more family or personal memories than do the other generations, whereas their children and grandchildren recall above all knowledge they gathered mainly from the media and school. The youngest generation, the grandchildren, related few ‘personal’ memories but when they did so, they retold the stories their grandparents told the most frequently. The youngest generation in general rarely attributed the memory to a family source, except when it concerned rationing: around 50% of the sources cited by the grandchildren were linked to communication with a family member, compared to only 20% of the sources for memories concerning the other three topics (bombing, collaboration, the royal question). In comparison, their parents—the middle generation—cited on average three times as many family member sources.

Researchers were thus able to determine that memories associated with national memory, acquired via school, media, books or art, play an essential role in the way individuals remember the war. The three generations, particularly the children and grandchildren, depend mainly on this type of memory, to the detriment of ‘personal memories’. A third of the memories associated with national memory that they chose to relate to their children and grandchildren are the same as those told by the grandparents. While the grandparents’ generation tend to turn to memories born of experience, two topics—collaboration and the royal question—nevertheless drew on other sources.

Extensive survey of war victims

In the future, the goal of Mr Luminet’s team will be to expand its research to Flemish families and families who experienced the war personally as victims or actors. The team’s hypothesis is that the degree of intergenerational transmission is greater than that measured by external source transmission if the oldest generation was directly exposed to the recounted events and suffered the consequences. Emotion will be a research parameter, because the team will seek to know whether it can change memory content or transmission type. A comparative study is underway in Hungary in which the question of the transmission of traumatic memories is posed to Jewish concentration camp survivors and their descendants.

Pauline Volvert

This research has been supported by grants from the Anciens et Amis de l’UCL (Alumni and Friends of UCL) (AUL-Louvain University Academia) and the Marie Curie Actions of the European Union, attributed to Charles B. Stone.

This UCL-City University of New York-New School for Social Research joint research was published in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.

A Glance at Olivier Luminet's bio

A Glance at Aurélie Vanderhaegen's bio