Doris Wolf Researching Memoirs of German Immigrants to North America
Mon. May. 1, 2017
Doris Wolf is currently on a research leave to research memoirs of German immigrants to North America, so we asked her to tell us more about this interesting project.
What is your current research project?
“I’m currently working on a book-length study of the experiences of ordinary Germans in World War II as represented in the memoirs of German immigrants to North America who were kriegskinder, that is, children of war. Dozens of these memoirs have been published in English in both Canada and the United States since the turn of the millennium. What’s notable about them is their participation in the increasingly popular though still very controversial discourse of so-called German victimization during the last years of the Nazi era. One of the things I’m interested in is how they use the figure of the child to help legitimize narratives of suffering in ways that counter simplistic approaches to Germany’s past as a perpetrator nation. I’m also very interested in how the memoirists portray their mothers, the women left standing alone on the home front trying to keep their children alive.”
Do you have a personal connection to this project?
“It’s a very personal project because both my parents were kriegskinder. My father is from the east near Berlin and escaped to West Germany a few years after the war and my mother was from the northwest, close to the North Sea. Two very different experiences, for sure, which I’ve come to understand much better through my research.”
How are you spending your research leave?
“I’m spending most of my time in my home study reading and writing but have been doing some travelling as well. I was a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Biographical Research at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in January and had the opportunity to share my work with some terrific people who had lots of insightful suggestions. In April, I went to one of my favourite places to do research: the National Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. I also have a conference coming up at York University in Toronto: the International AutoBiography Association, Chapter of the Americas, at which I’m giving a paper on the chapter I’m currently writing. It’s on the representation of women and girls in the memoirs, focusing on the mass rape that occurred by the Red Army.”
Where do you think the project will lead you to next?
“I’m not entirely sure since I’m right in the middle of it and am still very consumed by it. It’s built on quite a number of years of work on fictional texts related to German perpetration and victimization, so right now I’m seeing it more as a capstone project to this long-term interest. I’ve become engrossed in life writing, though, so I’m sure my next project will relate to this field.”
What are some of the courses are you teaching when you return from leave?
I’m excited to be teaching two Topics in Canadian Literature courses in Winter term that will focus on life writing: 3709 and 4710. In each, we’ll focus on a range of texts from celebrity and traumatic autobiographies to accounts of so-called everyday lives.