Gender and the Generations of Difficult Knowledge: Recent Responses to Familial Legacies of Nazi Perpetration

Over the last decade the children and grandchildren of Nazi perpetrators have produced a wave of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical books in which they seek to publicly work through the affective aftermath of repressed familial guilt. Two books are the focus of this article: Margret Nissen’s 2005 memoir of growing up as the daughter of Hitler’s star architect and armament minister Albert Speer, and Alexandra Senfft’s 2007 memories of her mother, the oldest daughter of Hitler’s representative in Slovakia, Hanns Ludin. My reading focuses on the gendered narratives the authors employ as they constitute their respective generational identities vis-à-vis the difficult knowledge of silenced and denied family histories. Because of their families’ fame, Nissen and Senfft mobilize frames of reading and narration beyond themselves, thus paving the way for a new generation of respondents to such stories. (SL)