ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Mónika Fodor discusses how memory, and in particular intergenerational memory, is related to history in ethnic subjectivity construction. The thematic analysis focuses on Reinhart Kosseleck’s notion of “historical consciousness,” the personalized understanding of the past, the present and, the future intertwined in a single event. Fodor uses the concept to analyze ten intergenerational memory narratives and demonstrates how second- or late-generation European-American respondents narrate their ancestors’ life and choices in major historical events and periods such as World War II, the 1956 Revolution in Hungary, and the Great Depression in the United States. The discursively constructed and interconnected stories about historical participation invite questions and also allow rearrangements in retrospect. Historical consciousness reopens the temporal and spatial contexts of postmemory and makes many distinct attitudes, patterns, concerns, and solutions accessible for the storytellers. Ethnic subjectivity construction happens by framing individual intergenerational memory narratives in default historical group narratives as temporality. Narratives operate on two levels: they recast the lived experience of parents or higher generation ancestors as victims, witnesses, or even perpetrators and through the meaning-making potential of narrative they justify or refute membership in an ethnic group.
