The Rebuilding of Fragmented Memories,Broken Families and Rootless Selves among Danish Care Leavers

Care Leavers’ Engagement with their Past

The article is based on extensive anthropological fieldwork at the Danish Welfare Museum in Svendborg, Denmark. Over the last few decades, the museum has highlighted the history of institutionalized childcare. In 2002, the museum opened the permanent exhibition “You shall not think of your Father and Mother,” which tells the story of childcare in the twentieth century from the perspective of the children. The museum later completed a historical inquiry into child abuse and neglect in Danish children’s homes in the period 1945 to 1976, “The Godhavn Inquiry.” ² From 2013–2015, the museum conducted a research project entitled “In Care, In History,” which examined how children and vulnerable adults experienced their lives at state driven institutions in the period 1945 to 1980. ³ Later the research project “Welfare stories from the edge” was initiated to establish a new kind of social history through a collaboration with care leavers.

As a result of this engagement, the museum personnel are contacted weekly by care leavers who want to research their past and contribute with their story to the larger history of out-of-home care. From 2013 to 2018, I followed approximately fifty of these men and women, conducting life story interviews, in-depth-open-ended interviews and informal phone conversations. I also engaged in participant observation at social gatherings and venues related to their attempt to deal with their past at the museum, in their homes, or other settings.

The age range among the collaborators is relatively wide. The oldest were born in the 1940s and the youngest in the 1960s, and their experiences reflect a timespan with big changes to living conditions and the values associated with children and childhood. There are also major differences in their experiences before placement in a childrens’ home. Some were put in care immediately after birth; others were subjected to domestic violence and neglect before being removed from home. Yet others were placed due to poverty or because they skipped school. There is also variation in the length of time they spent in out-of-home care. Some spent their entire upbringing at the same children’s home, some were placed for shorter periods of time, while others were sent from place to place. Likewise, the children’s homes differ, from big gender-segregated reformatories with internal schools, to others that operated more like big families. How life developed after placement also differs. Some people married early, established stable families, and made a career, while others have lived tumultuous lives on the edge of society, experiencing alcohol abuse, homelessness, or crime. However, all the care leavers who engaged in the research project thought that their experience of the past was important for their present.

Danish care leavers embrace of their personal history should be seen as part of an international trend. Since the 1990s, care leavers in several countries have raised their voices and told of neglect and abuse in out-of-home care, and how a lack of contact with or knowledge about their family throughout their childhood has resulted in a feeling of being rootless. In many countries, this criticism has led to state commissioned inquiries or truth commissions, official apologies, and occasionally financial compensation, in an attempt to provide redress. ⁴ The reparation processes have produced a new field of practice for a range of professionals including historians, psychologists, lawyers, archivists, social workers, and museum professionals, and represents at the same time a subject for further research. Hence an international field of research into the historical abuse of children and the contemporary reparation processes has been constituted. ⁵ Within this field, a number of studies have investigated the historical inquiries and reconciliation processes as an international and historical phenomenon related to “the age of apology.” ⁶ Others have discussed and problematized the historical narratives of neglect and abuse produced through the historical inquiries. ⁷ Yet others have investigated how the memory making and identities of care leavers has been shaped in interaction with the new public narratives of abuse constituted through the inquiries. ⁸ For example, Delyth Edwards, on the basis of interviews with women raised in a Catholic orphanage in Belfast, points out that many of the women have large gaps in their autobiographical memories. They therefore draw on the dominant “master narrative” of abuse constituted through the process of reconciliation in Northern Ireland in their attempts to create a coherent narrative about their own life. ⁹ Another strand of literature focuses on the effort of care leavers to find information about their family background, especially through childcare files. ¹⁰ Murray, for example, identifies how the care files can be important for the construction of a coherent narrative and a sense of self among care leavers as they often remember little of their childhood and may not know why they were in care, or who their family members are. ¹¹ Others who have explored the topic of care leavers access to their care files have highlighted the need for preparation and support to deal with the impact of the records, the issue of ownership of the records, and the rights of care leavers to challenge the wording of their records. ¹²

Inspired by these studies, I focus on how Danish care-leavers—in a period where narratives of neglect and abuse in out-of-home care have been at the center of attention in public space—try to reinterpretate and renegotiate their past. My contribution to the field highlights care leavers’ agency and creativity, and how their memory-work involves numerous practices and subtle transformative processes.

Memory-Work as Transformative

I examine the practices and processes of engagement with the past as memory-work with transformative potential. Like everyone else, care leavers carry their memories within the body. However, by working on their past, their memories can obtain an exterior representative form that can be subjected to reflection, recognition, and social critique. ¹³ Within this process of externalization, reinterpretation, and renewed formulation of their past, I see narratives and materialization as important channels to transformations.

Narratives are important channels because the stories we tell ourselves and others regarding our lives play a major role in the shaping of one’s self. When we link episodic memories and information through coherent narratives, we create meaningful connections between the person we have been, the person we think we are today and the person we hope or fear to become in the future. It is also through such narratives that we position ourselves in relation to others. ¹⁴ Narratives are also central to the identity of being part of family and kin. The anthropologist Harold L. Goodall uses the concept of “narrative inheritance” to describe the stories given to children by and about family members. ¹⁵ According to Goodall, our inherited narratives connect us to a shared past and gives us a sense of who we are: “The narratives we inherit from our forbearers provide us with a framework for understanding our identity through theirs. It helps us see our working logic as an extension of, or a rebellion against, the way we tell the story of how they lived and thought about things. It allows us to explain to others where we come from and how we were raised in the continuing context of what it all means. We are fundamentally homo narrans—humans as storytellers—and a well-told story brings with it a sense of fulfillment and completion.” ¹⁶ Through memory-work, our life stories often change as episodic memories are activated and new information is gathered. This facilitates not only new connections and new explanatory models but also new possibilities for gaining access to a “narrative inheritance.”

Memory-work transformative processes are not merely narrative. Material markers such as biographical objects, places and buildings, photographs, folders, and albums also play a role in altering the self and social relationships. In my understanding of the role of materiality, I am inspired by the anthropologist Daniel Miller and his cultural materiality theories that demonstrate how we give our ideas, values, and relationships material shape through dialectical objectification processes that enable us to recognize them. ¹⁷ With reference to Miller, ethnologist Lene Otto has transferred this movement to memory-making. She observes how material memories control memory in a dual process in which certain things are selected as memories, while the selected things inform what is remembered or forgotten and the meaning we attach to our memories. In this way, biographical objects and other materials become tangible tools that help us maintain a biographical reflection and thus a sense of who we are. ¹⁸ In the memory-work of care leavers, material things are both something that is sought after to stimulate and support memory-making, but also something that is produced in order to construct and shape memories and relations.

Being Related and Kinning

When care leavers are searching for their birth family, their longing reflects the psychological importance of a historical, practical, and emotional connection to family for a sense of identity and belonging, and for well-being. ¹⁹ However, the longing for a family also reflects a conviction in our time and culture that our family history is an integral part of our autobiographies and selves. In our modern society, according to the historian, John Gillis, the family institution has become almost mythical in character and the focal point of our strongest emotions and feelings of attachment and identity. ²⁰

Biological relations are particularly prized. During the last few decades, numerous men and women who were adopted from birth have searched for their biological family, even in cases where they love and feel part of their adoptive family. At the same time, genealogy has become extremely popular and even a central theme in popular Danish TV reality shows like Traceless (1999), Who Do You Think You Are? (2010) and Lost Heirs (2018). As Birgitta Frello notes, a TV program like Traceless, which features people who are offered professional assistance to track down and reunite with long lost relatives, has a tightly staged plot that offers a narrow definition of kinship. The program’s basic premise is that kinship is first and foremost biological. ²¹ By lingering on strong, emotive scenes, the program supports the notion that knowledge of one’s own family is fundamental to one’s identity and that biological family relations can generate strong emotions including love. The televised family reunions therefore appear as a key to obtaining a sense of being whole. ²²

Consequently, when care leavers experience a lack of knowledge regarding their family and lineage and perceive it as preventing them from understanding who they are and where they belong, this is not merely a question of personal psychological need. Their longings, expectations, and disappointments should also be seen in relation to and partly shaped by a particular cultural and historical context in which the concept of family is loaded with idealized definitions that influence our understanding, feelings, and expectations of social relations within the family. ²³

But who counts as being family and kin? International anthropological literature on kinship makes it clear that there are many different cultural perceptions of what being related means, including a variety of ways of practicing kinship depending on the historical and cultural context. ²⁴ Based on this, anthropologist Janet Carsten has argued for the necessity of examining how people themselves perceive kin. Instead of seeing kinship as pre-defined analytic concepts, she suggests we use the concept of relatedness to analyze how people actually practice, feel, and understand kinship. In so doing, it becomes clear that kinship is created through dynamic processes and that family relations often change throughout a lifespan. ²⁵

A key area of research in recent years has been the bonding that takes place between parents and children who are not related in line with dominant Western ideas of kinship based on genetics. For example, the anthropologist Signe Howell has explored what adoptive parents in a Norwegian context do to make a new child a member of the family. To describe these very specific practices and processes, Howell has used the concept of “kinning” and makes the point that kin is something you actively do. ²⁶ At the same time, she emphasizes that kinning is universal and essential in the creation of family and kin among biological as well as non-biological relatives. ²⁷ In my analysis, I am inspired by Carsten’s open approach to kinship and I will use Howell’s concept of kinning to describe the practices by which care leavers seek to create and maintain, as well as repair and manage, their fragile relationships with people whom they consider to be part of their family and heritage.

A Blank Piece of Paper

When I arrange to meet with care leavers, I often ask them to find an object that they consider meaningful and reflective of the person they are today or the time they were placed in care. What Vibeke found and held up in front of her was a blank piece of paper. ²⁸ Although it is unusual for care leavers to have neither anecdotes or objects from their early childhood, it is not uncommon for care leavers to have a fragmented memory with many gaps. Uncertainty about one’s own family background and kin is a theme that often occurs. When care leavers who were placed in care during the 1940s and the following decades grew up without knowing their mothers, fathers, or siblings, it may have been partly because their parents either would not or could not care for them. However, this phenomenon was also due to a belief in protecting children from “unsavory” parents and “morally depraved environments” and thus was a significant component of childcare practice throughout much of the twentieth century. ²⁹ This approach was also taken outside Denmark, and the concept of “genealogical bewilderment” is often used to denote the existential confusion and uncertainty that an absence of knowledge of one’s own family can cause. ³⁰ However, as mentioned earlier, this should also be seen from the perspective of the significance of family in our particular historical and cultural context.

At the same time, many care leavers feet that their childrens’ home could not replace a family. Twentieth-century childcare philosophies upheld that ideally childrens’ homes would provide a secure environment and framework for family relations. In public debates, the main argument put forward was that children needed a “home” that mimicked traditional family relationships, as opposed to large and emotionally cold institutions. This ideal is also reflected in the terms children were told to use for the staff at some childrens’ homes, including foster mother and foster father, or aunt and uncle. ³¹ Yet many Danish care leavers describe childrens’ homes against what they understand as a real home and a real family - both when it comes to the functional interior design with dormitories and dining halls, an everyday life ruled by strict routines, and the nature of the relationships between the staff and the children. Many care leavers recount how staff members never displayed warmth or care, how it felt not to be seen or appreciated by anyone, and their grief when a favorite teacher or student suddenly disappeared. The fact that childrens’ homes were seldom perceived as being a real home is also connected to inherent paradoxes. A childrens’ home was never just a home. It also provided the framework for sociopolitical and educational intervention, bureaucratic procedures, administrative regulations on functionality, and cutbacks. Likewise, the childrens’ home was a workplace for staff who received a salary for their commitment to the children, and who had the opportunity to resign at any time. Therefore, it is common for many care leavers that their attachment to the childrens’ home where they grew up is accompanied with great ambivalence.

The early childhood of care leavers is also often surrounded by taboos and secrets. Many recount how adoptive and biological mothers were secretive about their history. Among the care leavers who contacted their parents for the first time as adults, many even discovered that their very existence had been a well-kept secret. As sociologist Carol Smart shows, family secrets often aim to protect kinship relations and enable the construction of a family narrative that lives up to the ideal concept of a good family. Therefore, that which is kept secret says a lot about the moral norms and power relations of society. ³² When care leavers encountered silence and half-truths, this often related to illegitimate pregnancies with inappropriate men such as German soldiers in occupied Denmark, poverty, neglect, abuse, or mental illness. In other words secrets and lies often concealed conditions associated with moral condemnation that could result in social ostracism and government intervention, which included removing children from their parental home. However such taboos also prevented several care leavers from creating a coherent narrative about the beginning of their life, and sometimes the secrets even seemed to cause deeper dysfunction in already vulnerable family relationships. Goodall describes family secrets as a “toxin” that poisons the relationships within the family. ³³ This also seemed to be the case among several care leavers I spoke to, quite a few of whom had decided to cut off connection to their relatives.

When care leavers experience missing childhood memories, it is also often due to the many radical breaks throughout their childhood. Close and continuous relationships through childhood play an important role in the formation of autobiographical memories. As we rarely remember anything from our first year of life, our earliest memories usually consist of a tapestry of tales from our close social environment. ³⁴ Likewise, our close relationships are essential for the exchange and maintenance of memories of shared experiences. ³⁵ However, care leavers have often been removed from their parents and siblings and several have also moved between various childrens’ homes and schools. Every time they were separated from the adults who took care of them and the children with whom they had shared their lives, they simultaneously lost witnesses to their own lives. A childhood characterized by countless disruptions means that several care leavers experience difficulties in forming coherent, autobiographical memories of their early childhood and often feel a sense of not belonging anywhere with anyone.

Many care leavers also lack material memories and other tangible traces from their childhood that can support their memories. There are many reasons why the traces of former, institutionalized children have often been erased, destroyed, or lost. Childhood items in the form of furniture and toys often belonged to the childrens’ home rather than the individual child, and typically these items were worn out or destroyed when a childrens’ home was modernized or closed. In some cases, documents and other objects related to individual children were destroyed for practical purposes such as a lack of space, which suggests that concerns for the facility were privileged over concerns for what information the children might need later in life. In other cases, journals were intentionally destroyed to protect either the children or the staff from troubling information. As already mentioned, material memories play an active role in the creation and maintenance of our memories because material memories can facilitate bringing the past into the present and help create a tangible connection between then and now. ³⁶ For many care leavers, the absence of material memories is therefore linked to the feeling that their memories are as vague as they are unreal. The absence of material memories is also associated with a lack of interest and care both on the part of parents and the staff. No one lovingly placed pictures of the children in frames and albums; no one kept and cherished things that belonged to them. On the contrary, the traces of all these children were either ignored, hidden, or destroyed.

At the same time, many care leavers feel that the absence of love in their childhood have followed them later on in life and affected their relationships with others. In many ways, this mirrors the key findings in the Maternal care and mental health (1952) report, in which developmental psychologist Bowlby argues that children who are left to their own devices and who lack close caregivers that can embrace their emotions will often form unstable relationships and attachments to others later on in life. ³⁷ In line with Bowlby’s studies, several care leavers recount how they struggle with a sense of abandonment and harbor an enormous sensitivity toward being rejected and fears of being exposed as being unworthy of love. Several also talk about the difficulties of forming trusting, safe, or close relationships with others. In addition, some struggle under the weight of mental, physical and sexual abuse, and social degradation.

In sum, many care leavers have lived with exceptionally fragmented and painful memories, and fragile, ambivalent, and conflict-filled relationships. Consequently, care leavers often have specific preconditions in regards to memory-making and family formation. In the following discussion I will explore their attempts to create, recreate, repair, and cope with their memories and relationships.

Reunion with the Biological Family

Birgitte, who was born in 1945 and placed in a home for infants until she was adopted at the age of three, always had the feeling that she did not really belong anywhere and felt a strong desire to find out more about her biological parents. For years the address of her biological mother given to her by the Danish authorities at her request “was smoldering in the drawer.” Her loyalty toward her adoptive mother held her back and it was not until after her passing that Birgitte decided to contact her biological mother. Initially, Birgitte just watched her biological mother from a distance to see “if she was a person I wanted to meet.” Later, she sent her mother a letter and shortly thereafter they met. Birgitte describes the meeting as “a revelation”: “I saw that I was like her—for better or worse.” During their first meeting, Birgitte was told that her biological father had been a German soldier. However Birgitte already had the feeling, “There were so many of us for sale after 1945.”

Later, Birgitte began to look for her biological father. It was an arduous and slow process because the personal information her father had given her mother was far from the truth. Among other things, he had failed to say that he was married and had children. When Birgitte finally succeeded in tracking him down after several years, he had passed away but she made contact with one of her half-brothers. The first time they met in 2012 he gave Birgitte an album with photographs of their father. On the cover, it says “Unsere Vater” (our father). For Birgitte, the album means the world. It is important that she can physically see herself in her father’s features. She holds one of the portraits up in front of her and remarks, “It’s like a reflection. He has the same forehead. I need to be reflected, I need it to know that he really is my father.” In the album, Birgitte also looks for signs of her mother’s impact on his life: “There is a photo from before he met my mother and he’s in uniform and he’s got such a blank look, seems upset. Somehow, he looks miserable. I’ve often imagined that he’s saying, well, now I’m a German soldier. And then there is another photo, where he has just met my mother, and he’s in civilian and he looks much happier there.” Birgitte also links the father’s expression with her mother in the photographs from the time after the war and returned to his German family: “There is resignation in his eyes. He can’t reach the woman in Denmark, so now he has to do his best, wherever he is.” However, when Birgitte studies the photographs, her absence is also a theme: “In particular, there is a picture from a communion where the whole family is gathered except me. I turn into little Birgitte when I see that picture. I think it is so unfair, I should have been there too.” Still, she describes the book with the pictures of her father as her most precious possession: “When I got this book, my half-brothers invited me into the family, even though my presence makes it clear, that our father failed all of us. This book shows that they accept me as a part of the family. I know it sounds like a cliché, but I feel more complete because of it.” ³⁸

Also Preben was placed in care as an infant and sought his biological parents as an adult. However, he is left with other emotions. Preben was born in 1950 and like Birgitte, he spent his first years in an infant home and was subsequently adopted by an elderly, married couple. After the death of his adoptive parents, Preben decided to get in contact with his biological parents. He wanted to gain knowledge about the beginning of his life. He also cherished the hope that he could get to know some new family members. He had always dreamed of having a sister or brother. For Preben, it took a long time to mobilize the courage to call his biological mother. And when he finally did, the contact was soon disconnected: “As it turned out my mother had another son who was very upset that I had visited ‘his’ mother.” Preben found it difficult to comprehend this reaction: “I think he could have turned it around and said, I’ve got a half-brother! We are both only children.” When Preben visited his biological mother, she wouldn’t tell him anything about his biological father. Therefore Preben found the paternity case at the municipal archives. His case contained more than one hundred pages, and Preben felt how the papers were “burning” in his hands. Reading through the large pile three times he discovered that his biological mother had known a butcher and a soldier. Both tried diligently to escape the paternity claim by offering various excuses. With a sad smile, Preben recounts, “One of them even said he had been kicked between his legs and was unable to have children.” Yet Preben decided to seek out the former soldier at his address and at the door, he presented himself. The likely father had grown very old and his wife placed herself right behind her husband in the doorway: “No matter what I asked him, the wife answered, and then he repeated the same answer.” Preben was not invited inside, but from the bottom of the staircase, he could see that there were no physical similarities between them. From time to time, Preben looks at the TV program Traceless and cannot help himself from sobbing: “That is exactly the reaction they are trying to get,” he says, “it’s pretty tasteless.” There is something shameful about being placed in foster care, Preben thinks, “You feel inferior. Because you were disqualified instead of chosen.” ³⁹

When Birgitte and Preben chose to seek out their biological parents, they shared a hope that the reunion could strengthen a sense of who they were. They shared a desire to repair broken relationships and become anchored within a family, not just narratively speaking but also relationally and emotionally. In many ways, Birgitte’s story of the reunion with her biological family seems to live up to her hope. However, the meetings with her biological family also involved dilemmas and potential conflicts that were handled through narrative and material constructions of relatedness. For example, Birgitte highlights the physical and mental traits she shares with her parents, which, in the absence of a shared life, are what bind them together. At the same time, by emphasizing her father’s unwillingness to be a German soldier, and by accentuating her parents’ love for each other, she legitimizes the relationship between her parents; a relationship that in the post-war years were perceived as treacherous, and which turned out to be largely founded in her father’s marital dishonesty. At the same time, her brother is kinning their relation through the book “Unsere Vater,” which becomes a material manifestation of the German family’s acceptance and inclusion of her as part of the family.

For Preben, however, it does not seem possible to create a narrative of relatedness to his biological family. He is neither received with the same openness from his biological mother or his half-brother, and in the paternity case, he can read page after page of how his probable fathers tried to shirk their responsibility, while his attempts to track one of them down culminated in a tragicomic scene that manifested his exclusion. This illustrates that it is a risky business to reconstruct fragmented memories and repair broken relations. Regardless of the outcome, it will affect the construction of one’s life story and how relationships can be imagined and lived in one’s future. In a study of adult, adoptive children’s reunions with their biological parents, Carsten describes how the reunions often activated and intensified pain and turmoil that was already present in the adoptive children before they started looking for their parents. ⁴⁰ According to Carsten, the relationships that had not been possible to establish from the beginning had “a doomed quality about them.” ⁴¹ The broken relationships were therefore rarely repaired as was the case with Birgitte. Rather most reunions could be characterized as a delayed loss and grieving process. This seems to apply to Preben, who achieved greater certainty but also lost his dream of gaining a sibling and ended up with a sad and shameful feeling of being disqualified instead of chosen. Reunions with a biological lineage usually result in a deeper knowledge of one’s own life span but not necessarily in ways that result in more peace of mind.

Headmasters and Headmistresses as Kin

While some care leavers turn toward their biological parents and siblings as their true kin, others regard the adults and children they grew up with as being their family. In particular the headmasters and headmistresses who were running the childrens’ homes play a significant role for some care leavers.

When I visited Steff, he had found several objects and photos he wanted to show me. In particular, he wanted to show me a porcelain polar bear, “that says it all.” At the childrens’ home where Steff grew up, the polar bear used to stand on the desk in Headmaster Thøffner’s office. Thøffner had received it from his father the day he got the position as headmaster and he passed it on to a trusted employee, Mr. Mørk when he became headmaster at another childrens’ home. Shortly after Mr. Mørk retired, he passed it on to Steff, who by then for many years had been the headmaster of a boarding school. At the bottom of the polar bear, some words are etched in pencil. On the day Thøffner took over as headmaster his father wrote, “Christmas 1949 Thøffner.” The year 1969 was added when Mr. Mørk became headmaster, and when Steff received the polar bear, he added his own name and the name of his daughter, because he planned to give it to her when she graduated.

Steff remember his childhood at the childrens’ home with joy and gratitude. With the headmaster and his wife and Mr. Mørk and his wife, he found important adults, or in Steff’s own words, “lighthouses” with principles and values that he has used to navigate himself after ever since. As a child, Steff wanted to become a teacher like these adults and today he can look back on a long productive life where he, as a headmaster himself, has continued the pedagogy and the spirit from his own childhood.

Steff explained why the polar bears carry such importance to him: “Instead of spending five hours talking about how my entire life has depended on the ten years I’ve been at the home, the story of the polar bear tells it in two minutes. It tells how meaningful that time was to me, and how much Mr. Mørk knows it meant to me and when for example I phone Mr. Mørk like I did the other day because his wife is at a hospice and I don’t really know if I am entitled to visit her…and then I say to Mr. Mørk, ‘I know that basically, it’s a family matter, but I still have to ask: can I visit her?,’ and then he answers, ‘Well, I am happy you asked because you are family’.” Steff choked up as he told me this and had to pause with his head in his hands before he finished his story about the polar bear with the phrase, “That’s how it was at the childrens’ home.” ⁴²

For Steff, the polar bear is used as a metaphor and proof that the childrens’ home where he grew up was a good place despite dominant notions of such places as being cold and eerie. At the same time, the polar bear is used to connect him with the past and create a continuity between the boy who saw the polar bear standing on the headmaster’s desk and who dreamed of becoming a teacher himself, and the later headmaster he became. The polar bear confirms that he has succeeded in achieving his goals. The polar bear is also associated with a binding heritage. The figure is heavy and expensive, and the polar bear is a solitary, strong, and awe-inspiring animal. With the polar bear comes authority, but also responsibility and obligation. The etching beneath it became a vow. The polar bear is also used for kinning the relationship between Steff and the headmasters. This became evident when Steff immediately added his daughter’s name and links the story of the polar bear’s significance with the tale of visiting the ailing Mrs. Mørk. The connections between care leavers and the staff that took care of them as children may be strong, but the relationships are not surrounded by the same heavy cultural notions of “blood ties” that are prevalent in genetic family relations. This explains why Steff was uncertain and nervous about asking Mr. Mørk if he could visit Mrs. Mørk and why he was so relieved when he got the answer “you are family.” Thus, the polar bear not only represents a significant relationship, but it also materializes and confirms it. Through the polar bear, Thøffner’s father, Mr. and Mrs. Thøffner, Mr. and Mrs. Mørk, Steff and his daughter are connected as a lineage that not only gives Steff’s life a greater meaning but also an emotional anchoring and composure.

For Sys, the relationship with the headmistress also carried great significance, but her story testifies to the limitations of this kind of relationship. In 1947, when Sys was a year and a half, she was placed at a childrens’ home run by a strong authoritative headmistress called Lau, and her two assistants. The three women did everything themselves; they cooked, cleaned, sewed, washed clothes, and brought up twenty girls aged two to eighteen. The women were friendly, but they were busy, and everyday life was governed with strict rules and many duties. Adult contact was first and foremost achieved when the children helped the women with their chores. But Sys, who was a happy and beautiful girl, was a special star for the headmistress Lau: “I became hers.” It was always Sys who followed the headmistress when she went to church and when the board of the childrens’ home came to visit, Sys was expected to sing for them while wearing her nice clothes. Already as a child Sys could see how unfair it was that she was the chosen one. But nevertheless the feeling of being something special for an adult was of immense importance: “The conditions for the children were just like it is in nature, the strongest flowers survived while the others faded. I was a strong flower.”

For Sys, living at a childrens’ home was not something she thought much about. If her friends at school asked why she was placed in care, she said her parents had died: “That was an acceptable explanation.” Sometimes she longed for an “absolutely wonderful mother” but she loved Lau and felt happy. But then around the time of her communion, Lau decided to retire: “She had always told me I was her girl and to me, she was my mother, so I wanted to go with her, it was as simple as that, but I couldn’t.” One of the evenings before she retired, Lau told Sys to come down and serve coffee for some guests, so Sys put on her nice clothes and did what was asked of her. When the guests left and Sys was on her way back up the stairs, Lau told her that the visitors were her parents: “I remember fainting and the next morning I had a red rash all over.” The world in which Sys knew who she was and where she belonged, slipped away under her feet. And then came the new headmistress: “I began to misbehave from the moment she walked through the door, and I ganged up the other kids against her. I always took great care of the little ones, so I had their trust, and they did what I said.” Sys was soon expelled because of her behavior toward the new headmistress and went to live with her biological mother, who had married and had two children since she gave up Sys. But Sys did not fit into the new family. She had the acute sense that her mother thought that everything about her was all wrong, “I was not even allowed to say that I had been placed in care.”

Sys kept in touch with Lau for as long as the old headmistress lived. In her room, Sys has a large black-and-white portrait of the stately lady, and it is unconditionally the relationship with Lau that Sys considers to be the most important one of her childhood. At the same time, the story illustrates how difficult it is for many children placed in care to create family relations with the staff, even for the children who carry a “higher status.” Throughout much of her life, Sys has struggled with the sense of abandonment she experienced when Lau did not bring her with her when she left the home, and when the “real mother” that Lau had tried to put in her place turned out not to be “absolutely wonderful” but an alien woman with whom Sys never achieved a close relation. Instead the “real mother” induced within her the feeling of being wrong. ⁴³

Anchored within a Community of Shared Destiny

As a final example of how some care leavers attempt to repair broken family relations, I turn to the memory-work of Rebekka. Rebekka’s story illustrates a situation where it neither seems possible to anchor herself narratively or emotionally to the headmistress at the childrens’ home or to her biological family. Yet her memory-work still seems transformational as she critically reflects on the various ways she was subjectified as an orphan and a secret.

Rebekka was born in 1961, and during the first years of her life she lived in the United States with her big brother and their African-American father and Danish mother. When her parents divorced, the mother returned with the children back to Denmark. There they lived in poverty without contact with or help from the family of Rebakka’s mother: “My mother was mentally ill and had two children of color so her family turned their back on her.” In 1969, Rebekka and her brother were removed from their home, and from then on Rebekka grew up in various childrens’ homes until she turned eighteen.

A sense of alienation runs as a recurring theme throughout Rebekka’s life. In many ways, she was fine during her long stay at the last of her childrens’ homes, but when she moved out at the age of eighteen, she was left alone and did not feel welcome when she visited the place. Rebekka had a hard time caring for herself, “I really felt that I was nobody’s child.” Rebekka especially remembers how lonely it felt on her first Christmas Eve on her own, and how she gave a gibberish answer the first time someone asked her where she was going to spend Christmas. That question caught her off guard and the truth was too painful to reveal. Rebekka’s relation to the childrens’ home and its headmistress got even more damaged when she got access to her own case files. In “the orderly papers,” Rebekka could read how she was described throughout her childhood and she was particularly upset to read that the headmistress, “the woman I called ‘Auntie’ and made gifts for,” described Rebekka as groveling: “It’s like she stabbed me in the back.” Going through the files was a bitter experience that marred Rebakka’s memories of the childrens’ home and any kind of relatedness she might have felt as a child.

Years later Rebekka began searching for her African-American family. One of the first things she did was to place an advert in a Nigerian newspaper calling for someone who had known her father. She received so many letters that they could not fit into her mailbox. According to Rebekka most were just looking for ways to get a footing in the West, but the letters were fascinating none the less. Later, when Danish national television began broadcasting the program Traceless, Rebekka signed up as a participant, but was never chosen as a participant. Still, thanks to the program, she got a better idea of how to search for her father and took classes in genealogy. Through the classes, Rebekka received assistance on how to look through American records, and she discovered two half-siblings in the United States. First, she tried to find them through Facebook and was sending friend requests to “pretty much everyone in California with an afro look,” but then she found their mother’s name in the records, and finally found them: “I became so happy. I could immediately see I had finally hit the jackpot. They looked just like me.” Rebekka has since been in contact with her half-siblings through Facebook. However, a trip to California is out of the question, Rebekka says, pointing to the bags of bottles she collects in the street to supplement her social benefits.

Through genealogy, Rebekka also began to investigate her mother’s lineage, and she tried to connect with some of her cousins. However, she never managed to establish a trusting relationship with her mother’s side of the family. Rebekka has met two of her cousins a few times, but instead of talking about the family they “would rather talk about the weather.” In addition, they knew very little about Rebekka’s mother and apparently had kept no material memories of her. To name an example, Rebekka recalls the letters she knows that her mother sent from the United States to her Danish family. Apparently, they have all been thrown out. Rebekka is convinced that everything concerning her mother and herself has been erased from her mother’s family history. She lowers her voice and almost whispers: “It’s a secret…I was made a secret. There probably are not many in the family and certainly not among the younger generations, who even know that I exist. I have been placed in the book of oblivion.”

Rebekka views her mother’s family as middle-class and asks rhetorically: “How many family gatherings have you participated in, where someone stands up to bring a toast to the children placed in care or locked up in prison? However even a homeless person has two parents, so if everyone who is forgotten did their genealogy, how many relatives would they find? How many ‘nice people’ would then have to realize that they were related to those ‘objects’?” However, Rebekka has no intention of accepting her family status as an outcast and a secret. After visiting the Danish village where her mother’s family lives, she joined the village’s Facebook group: “And then I wrote, ‘I’m so happy to be in this Facebook group and now let me tell you a story’. Everyone knows everyone in the village, so now they really have something to talk about!”

Although Rebekka’s longing for a family might reflect some idealized notions about families and kinship, it also reflects her experiences of being left alone when everyone else seems to be part of a family. This is clearly illustrated in her account of her first Christmas alone. Rebekka makes several attempts to uncover her story and anchor it to someone else’s. But in her efforts, she repeatedly encounters information and people who do not give her many opportunities for relatedness and kinning. Instead, her status as an orphan and a secret are manifested and exposed. Instead of accepting this in silence, Rebekka adopts a deliberate and provocative approach, for example, by spreading her truth to her mother’s village. In these situations, Rebekka seems to draws on and contributes to the narrative of neglect and abuse centered around the political struggle to obtain a public apology from the state. In this fight, she finds political backing for critical reflections that help her distance herself from rejection by the childrens’ home and her biological family. According to Rebekka, it is the unholy alliance between “nice families” and the welfare state that enables and legitimizes that unwanted “objects” like her mother and herself can be easily excluded by the family, and end up placed in psychiatric wards and childrens’ homes, where they turn into “secrets” and eventually are forgotten in the “book of oblivion.” Through her criticism, Rebekka frees herself from past stigma and shame associated with the subjectification of her as an orphan and a secret. Instead, she positions herself as a commemorative political agent along with other care leavers who are struggling for recognition for the unfair treatment they received. On the Facebook group of the Godhavn’s Boys National Association—a group of care leavers fighting for an official apology from the state—Rebekka often post critical comments like, “The State apparently wants to destroy us. Why did they place us in childrens’ homes just to destroy us?” By problematizing her rootlessness Rebekka achieves another form of anchoring in an online community made of care leavers who were neglected and forgotten but now raise their voices and point to the injustices they have experienced. ⁴⁴

Conclusion

Many care leavers long for a sense of continuity and cohesion in life and a stronger sense of belonging. In this article I have drawn attention to the tangible and creative practices and processes by which care leavers attempt to rebuild fragmented memories, fragile relationships, and rootless selves.

The cases illustrate that sometimes the efforts of care leavers result in feelings of cohesion in life and a stronger sense of belonging. However, their efforts also involve the risks of coming into contact with disturbing emotions and the doomed qualities of broken relationships. As already mentioned, Carsten’s analysis of adoptive children’s reunions with their biological parents rarely found that broken relationships were repaired in a manner that gave a happy outcome. Still, many believed it had improved their lives because—according to Carsten—reunions enable a certain sense of control over events in the past that were formerly controlled by others, “a sense that they are choosing their kin for themselves.” ⁴⁵ This point is supported in this article, which shows how care leavers through their agency and practices are turning broken or fragile relations into kin while dealing with ambivalences, conflicts, tensions, and rejections. I argue that it is precisely through these active practices, reflections, interpretations, selections, and deselections that care leavers transform not only their personal history but also the way they position themselves and relate to others in society.

The article contributes to the academic field of studies around care leavers’ engagement with their past by illustrating how care leavers, through active memory-work, relate to, reflect on, and try to break free from the way they have been shaped by the past, and the creative processes by which relations are rebuilt, repaired, and strengthened through kinning. At the same time, the focus on care leavers with major gaps in their life stories and few relationships they can take for granted, illuminate the different preconditions for memory making and the creation of family and kin. It also illustrates how we all have an individual and collective role to play in the way we create and give shape to our memories and social relations.