Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Negotiating family history: Media use among descendants of Danish Nazis

  • EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: August 3, 2017
Communications
From the journal Communications Volume 42 Issue 3

Abstract

Danish descendants of former national socialists live in a society that characterizes their parents as traitors. They are therefore likely to experience a stark divergence between how the past is described in media texts and in their families. Taking media use as the starting point, this contribution explores the role Occupation-related media texts play for Nazi descendants and how they relate them to memories generated in their families. The contribution is empirically based on five semi-structured, qualitative interviews with children of former Danish Nazis. To understand the respondents’ media use, a remembered media repertoires approach is developed and employed in conjunction with a semi-narrative interview strategy. The findings suggest that respondents from families that have cultivated a memory about the Nazi past use media texts to supplement their family memory and criticize the mainstream cultural memory, whereas respondents from families where this past was a taboo avoid Occupation-related media texts but accept the cultural memory’s portrayal of national socialists.

Keywords: cultural memory; collected memory; family memory; family history; Nazi descendants; media repertoires
Published Online: 2017-8-3
Published in Print: 2017-9-26

©2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Communicating family memory: Remembering in a changing media environment
  4. Articles
  5. The media construction of family history: An analysis of “Who do you think you are?”
  6. Bereavement photographs as family photographs: Findings from a phenomenological study on family experience with neonatal end-of-life photography
  7. Sharing grief and mourning on Instagram: Digital patterns of family memories
  8. Mediated memory making: The virtual family photograph album
  9. Research in brief
  10. Negotiating family history: Media use among descendants of Danish Nazis
  11. Book Reviews
  12. E. Oliveira, A. Duarte Melo & G. Conçalves: Strategic communication for non-profit organisations: Challenges and alternative approaches
  13. S. Mertens & H. de Smaele: Representations of Islam in the news: A cross-cultural analysis
  14. I. R. Smith: The Hollywood meme: Transnational adaptations in world cinema
https://doi.org/10.1515/commun-2017-0032
Keywords for this article
cultural memory; collected memory; family memory; family history; Nazi descendants; media repertoires

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Communicating family memory: Remembering in a changing media environment
  4. Articles
  5. The media construction of family history: An analysis of “Who do you think you are?”
  6. Bereavement photographs as family photographs: Findings from a phenomenological study on family experience with neonatal end-of-life photography
  7. Sharing grief and mourning on Instagram: Digital patterns of family memories
  8. Mediated memory making: The virtual family photograph album
  9. Research in brief
  10. Negotiating family history: Media use among descendants of Danish Nazis
  11. Book Reviews
  12. E. Oliveira, A. Duarte Melo & G. Conçalves: Strategic communication for non-profit organisations: Challenges and alternative approaches
  13. S. Mertens & H. de Smaele: Representations of Islam in the news: A cross-cultural analysis
  14. I. R. Smith: The Hollywood meme: Transnational adaptations in world cinema
Downloaded on 10.4.2026 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/commun-2017-0032/html
Scroll to top button