Nicht der Rede wert: Die Privatisierung der Kriegserfahrung in der frühen Bundesrepublik. Lebensgeschichtliche Erinnerungen

In her book Nicht der Rede wert, historian Vera Neumann explores the allusions and unspoken references to what was experienced and suffered in life-history narratives about the war and post-war period. In the narratives about the years of reconstruction and the economic miracle in West Germany, she wants to track down thematic areas that contain taboos and reinterpretations. She wants to show to what extent the war experiences and the mental and physical after-effects were "privatized" and perceived exclusively as a personal fate, and how they were dealt with in the families. She raises the question of the possible interpretations of what was experienced and the possibilities of addressing it publicly.

The basis for Neumann's work is the interview material from the project "Lebensgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte im Ruhrgebiet 1930-1960" (LUSIR), conducted in the early 1980s under the direction of Lutz Niethammer, which is now stored in the Archive for History and Biography at the Open University of Hagen. This material, which Neumann subjects to a secondary evaluation, was already evaluated as part of the LUSIR study. At that time, however - according to Niethammer in his introduction to Neumann's book - "too little attention was paid to the hints of the unspeakable". He criticizes the interpretations of that time as too "essayistic, (...) too little comprehensible in the individual steps in a regular way".