“Let me tell you what we already know”: Collective memory between culture and interaction

Introduction

Despite memory studies’ undeniable success in terms of growth and impact, the field has been criticized from various angles. In this article, I single out two strands of critique that have informed the methodological and epistemological choices underlying its arguments and the research agenda it seeks to promote.

First, memory studies has been criticized for having a lack of methodological discussion and specific memory methods. This critique has emerged around 20 years ago and has continuously been voiced until today. Wulf Kansteiner’s (2002) article Finding Meaning in Memory has instigated the debate. Following the “memory boom” of the 1980s and 1990s, Kansteiner (2002: 108) claimed that “. . . memory has clearly become a central concept in the humanities and social sciences, it remains unclear to what extent this convergence reflects actual common intellectual and methodological interests.” In a similar vein, Roediger and Wertsch (2008: 19) argue, in the very first issue of Memory Studies, that “unless and until proper methods and theories are developed . . . memory studies as a proper discipline might still be awaiting its birth.” There are also interdisciplinary skeptics who have argued against common methods because they believe this search for shared “methods might be unproductive” (Brown et al., 2009: 121).

About 10 years after Kansteiner’s initial critique, Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley (2013) have made the first (and so far also the last) attempt to compile and think through various memory methods. In an edited volume, Pickering and Keightley compile methodological essays on a wide range of potential memory methods and sources for memory research. After 2013, very little collective effort has been made to develop and/or bring together memory methods. Doing Memory Research (Drozdewski and Birdsall, 2019) is the only other publication that focusses on just a fraction of the methodological spectrum. As an edited volume, it brings together essays that are mostly concerned with (technologically) innovative memory methods and questions of affect and embodiment.

The second critique on the field is connected to the methodological and epistemological concern voiced by the scholars mentioned earlier. The field of memory studies has been criticized for its lack of interest in individuals and their role in the formation and reproduction of social meaning in memory. Interestingly, this critique is mostly voiced by social scientists and historians and seems to target work in memory studies employing literature and cultural studies perspectives. Wulf Kansteiner (2010: 4), again, called for more attention in memory studies to individuals (Menschen) and their involvement in the dynamics of power. Seemingly rhetorically, Kansteiner (2010: 3) asks, “Does it make any sense to raise once more questions about the concepts of the individual and the collective in social memory studies?” Among sociologists of memory, there seems to be some concerted effort to “write the individual back into collective memory” (Keightley and Pickering, 2012: 102).

I briefly engage with the two of those sociological proposals that have particularly inspired this article and engage specifically with the two critiques sketched earlier. First, Keightley et al. (2019) point to the lack of empirical work and theory in memory studies that explain how specific groups and more general cultural memories interact. They propose an “interscalar” approach that could assist the research of “the relationship between different forms of and modalities of remembering” on the micro, meso, and macro level, something memory studies has “failed” to do (Keightley et al., 2019: 5). The interscalar approach to memory has, so far, remained a theoretical and methodological proposition. I operationalize the idea of interscalarity both ontologically and epistemologically in this article. First, ontologically, I show how everyday narrations of the past by individuals are informed by different, and sometimes contradictory, macro-level, and relatively stable, cultural narratives. These socially shared memory narratives can be employed interchangeably when interactional dynamics and changing normative frameworks require them to. I argue that the combination of micro-discourse analysis and ethnography allows for us to study memory as an interscalar phenomenon in which socially shared meanings are constantly moved from the macro-cultural to the micro-interactional and back. Second, epistemologically, this article argues for the need for a micro lens to look at verbal data that reflect socially shared representations of the past. As I demonstrate in the empirical part of this article, these micro-methodological approaches provide for more and different insights into the interactional dynamics of collective and cultural memory.

Second, I connect the idea of the interscalar to the vernacular, relational approaches to collective memory that Sarah Gensburger has recently proposed. Gensburger urges memory scholars to reread the work of Maurice Halbwachs as relational and interactional. In Gensburger’s reading of Halbwachs, collective memory is “defined by the individual’s position in a complex and structured social space and by the evolution of that structure” (Gensburger, 2016: 401). She sees in Halbwachs a call for more empirical studies, paying attention to “the individual as a social being, in the development of an interactionist and relational approach to memory” (Gensburger, 2016: 407). Gensburger has developed this approach empirically by researching vernacular memories through ethnography and interviewing (Gensburger, 2019a, 2019b).

To take these two proposals seriously, a methodological setup is necessary that provides insight into how ordinary people attribute meaning to the past in everyday interactions. This setup should facilitate research into how people take their cues from culturally and politically dominant memory narratives and tropes, and flexibly perform those in front of others. The methodology that I am proposing and developing in this article combines micro-analysis with ethnography. During a period of 2 years, I have gathered data among a group of friends in the contemporary Polish town of Oświęcim. The town is internationally known as Auschwitz and has the main sites of the former extermination camp and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on its territory. During 2 years of field work, I sought to understand how ordinary people in Auschwitz/Oświęcim attribute meaning to the past of their town, to what extent those meanings are informed by socially and culturally dominant memory narratives, and how these meanings take shape in everyday interactions.

I observed the group of friends for one summer (July until October 2017) in face-to-face interactions during their free time together. Simultaneously, I also conducted participant observation in two Facebook groups in which they were active. One Facebook group is an informal group of which only their friends are members, and the other Facebook group was an international one composed of people with an interest in researching Auschwitz. After a year of analysis of the data resulting from this ethnographic fieldwork, I conducted individual follow-up narrative interviews (Flick et al., 2004: 206; Schutze, 1977) with a selected sample of group members. During those interviews, we discussed some of my findings about their interactions in order for me to understand how they explain their own actions and interactions. This interviewing method was partly inspired by restitution in ethnography (Zonabend, 1994) and bares some similarities to the explication interview (Vermersch, 2007). The fragment of which I am presenting a micro-analysis later on in this article is a 3-minute segment of such an interview.

The methodological idea of combining micro-analysis with long-term ethnographic observation is inspired by studies in other fields that are only seldomly engaged with in memory studies. First and foremost, my research is inspired by the interactional sociological work of Erving Goffman (see, for example, Goffman, 1959, 1961, 1969). Goffman has impressively theorized everyday social interaction and “the presentation of self in everyday life.” Goffman often combined long-term ethnography (in hotels, institutions for the mentally ill and casinos) with micro-analysis of linguistic and conversational strategies and actions. This empirical work led him to describe the “interaction order” as a “substantive domain in its own right” (Goffman, 1983: 2) with its own logic and dynamic that can be studied by social scientists. Elsewhere (Van de Putte, 2021a), I have argued for not only look to Goffman for methodological ideas, but also for analytical concepts that could assist us in seeing how the forms and contents of collective memory narratives are integral to “presentations of the self.”

Second, this research is inspired by the field of linguistic ethnography and how it has been developed, mostly in the United Kingdom, in the last two decades. Linguistic ethnography investigates how “verbally communicated information . . . are informed and even shaped by the social and interpersonal context in which speech occurs” (Hanks, 2006: 116). In that sense, connecting micro and macro is at the forefront of linguistic ethnography’s research agenda. The field broadly relies on two premises. The first is that “meaning takes shape within specific social relations, interactional histories and institutional regimes, produced and construed by agents with expectations and repertoires that have to be grasped ethnographically” (Rampton et al., 2014: 4). In that respect, researching participants in their various contexts of socialization, where they are exposed to culturally dominant narratives and meanings, is crucial. The second assumption on which linguistic ethnography relies is that meaning is essentially linguistically constructed: “. . . Meaning is far more than just the ‘expression of ideas,’ and biography . . .” (Rampton et al., 2014: 4). Rampton, Maybin, and Roberts write that when “other” social scientists are confronted with research done by sociolinguists (and linguistic ethnographers) on social interaction, they are usually puzzled because their research is grounded in more “static demographic identity ascriptions,” while actual communication “entails close and continual attunement among the participants, calibrating what’s produced with the range of patterns one has hitherto come to expect, and there is often considerable socio-ideological investment in these expectations” (Rampton et al., 2014: 11). In this linguistically ethnographic research tradition, some scholars have also looked at collective and cultural memory through the concept of the chronotopes (Agha, 2007; Blommaert and De Fina, 2017; De Fina et al., 2020).

Bringing a Goffmanian and linguistically ethnographic framework to the interscalar and relational study of vernacular collective memories can also add some new insights to the study of past and its representations by discourse scholars in linguistics and social psychology. First, critical discourse analysis (CDA) has provided us with a range of work that analyzes how language both constitutes and is constitutive of cultural memory and collective (mostly national) identities. With some notable exceptions (e.g. De Cilia et al., 2020; Heer et al., 2008; Wodak, 2018), these approaches focus on the institutional discourses of the powerful. Martin Reisigl (2009, 2018), for example, analyzes the highly scripted commemorative speeches by politicians of the anniversary of the First Republic of Austria and its silencing of the Nazi interlude. In Austria and Germany, Heer, Manoschek, Pollak, and Wodak have studied the discourses produced in reaction to the two “Wehrmacht-exhibitions” (in 1995 and 2001) in the media, and by politicians, cultural, and educational actors, but also through video interviews with visitors of the exhibition. Similarly, Mariana Achugar (2008, 2009) analyzes the discursive practices fuelling the formation of institutional memories in and by the Uruguayan military. Three features distinguish my approach from this research tradition.

First, in this article and my other work (Van de Putte, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c), I analyze discourses as they are produced and reproduced by “ordinary” people who are neither political, art, or media professionals, three groups that are generally over-represented in memory studies and CDA research. ¹ Second, my approach does not serve a critique that goes beyond the academic field to which I am contributing. I limit myself to describing and interpreting the interactional and cultural dynamics that allow for the articulation of highly political memory narratives. I do not prescribe ways for my individual participants, or for the political institutions they are exposed to, to remember better. Normativity and morality play a role as analytical concepts in this article, to understand the expectations my participants have of others when they enter a situation. Finally, the ethnographic is, apart from some exceptions (e.g. Achugar et al., 2013; Wodak and Savski, 2018), largely absent in CDA approaches to memory. In this article, I demonstrate the potential of combining a micro-discourse analysis with ethnographically detailed knowledge.

The ethnographic also sets this study apart from interactional studies of memory and its social nature outside of the field of CDA. These studies employ narrative analytical frameworks (e.g. Brockmeier, 2002, 2015; Schiff, 2005; Schiff and Cohler, 2001; Schiff et al., 2006; Schiff and Noy, 2006; Schiffrin, 2002); use conversational, interactional frameworks (Brown and Reavey, 2014, 2015); and have greatly contributed to our insights in the flexibility of the remembering self and questions of personal identity and cultural and collective memory. Schiff and Schiffrin, for example, address these questions in their analyses of interviews with Holocaust survivors. But these studies do not combine verbal data with ethnographic observations, although that could enrich our insights in how the social contexts in which participants are embedded impact their discourses and narrations of the past. Furthermore, they engage with data that reflect on the social nature of autobiographical narratives, life history, and stories of personal experience. The data analyzed in this article concern none of those. They concern third-person narrations, or “narratives of vicarious experience” (Norrick, 2013a, 2013b, 2020). The participant that I introduce in this article was born at least 30 years after the Second World War. During my period of fieldwork, he has never brought up stories of wartime experience among his relatives or acquaintances. He purely relies on socially shared meanings and narratives when he narrates the Second World War, Nazi occupation, and Holocaust. As I will demonstrate later in this article, the distinctiveness of my data in that respect is salient because these collective memory narratives, and narratives of vicarious experience in general, are more discursively invested in establishing knowledge and epistemic authority, while in the first-person autobiographical narratives, life histories, and stories of personal experience, the epistemic authority and telling rights of the narrator are easily taken for granted. However, they are generally more invested with dealing with affect than are narratives of vicarious experience. These discursive distinctions are insufficiently taken into account in theories of cultural memory and culture more generally.

Levels of analysis: text, co-text, context, and non-text

Before I delve into the analytical part of this article, I should set out the levels of analysis at work in this article. I mobilize both ethnographic observations and co-textual and contextual factors to analyze and explain what happens in the interaction.

The exchange that I am analyzing in this article is part of an interview with one of my research participants in Auschwitz/Oświęcim: Adam (pseudonym). The interview took place on 19 September 2018 in the late afternoon in the participant’s living room. It lasted about 2 hours 12 minutes. The fragment that I am analyzing here started around 1 hour 1 minute into the interview and stopped 3 minutes later. The interview was conducted around 1 year after I had finished my participant observation in face-to-face and online interactions. During the interview, we discussed some elements of my data that I found puzzling and which I had already analyzed. I wanted to hear Adam reflect on parts of that data. I took screenshots of nine Facebook fragments with me to the interview. I presented these screenshots to Adam and asked him to reflect on them.

In the segment that I analyze here, we discuss two Facebook posts published by Adam. On 29 December 2015, Adam shared an archival picture of a city street in Auschwitz/Oświęcim during the Nazi Occupation on his personal profile. He accompanies the picture with the text “Poznaj Oświęcim !!! Okupacja . . .” (Meet Oświęcim !!! Occupation . . .). On the same day, he also shared this post on the international Auschwitz Study Group on Facebook and adds more information in English: “The town of Oświęcim, the main photo from the German occupation of Auschwitz comes from my collection.” Elsewhere (Van de Putte, 2021c), I discuss the role of these two different toponyms in delineating the two (geographically overlapping) memoryscapes of “Auschwitz” and “Oświęcim.” “Auschwitz” is used by my participants to refer to the sacred, commemorative realm of Auschwitz. By “Oświęcim,” they mean the profane contemporary town where they live. The tension between the space of “Auschwitz” or “the camp,” and the one of “Oświęcim” or “the town” is present throughout the interview.

Because the segment analyzed here is part of a larger interview, it is important to also describe some co-text: that what was being said just before and after the selected segment. Before the selected segment, we discuss Adam’s knowledge of English and the extent to which that limits his participation in international Facebook groups such as the Auschwitz Study Group. We also discuss the quality of the translations of his posts and who is translating them. Just after the segment finishes, Adam laments the fact that the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum does not do enough to inform international visitors about the fact that “Oświęcim” is and was an ordinary town.

I have argued earlier in this article that my approach of combining micro-analysis with ethnography sets my research apart from other discourse, interactional, and conversation analytical approaches to collective memory. I argue with Jan Blommaert (1997: 41) that not everything that is to be known will transpire from the transcript. There is ethnographic “non-text” necessary to understand the text (Blommaert, 1997: 60). Adam is about 50 years old. Professionally, he is self-employed and repairs and installs windows. Because of his job, he visits many old houses where he usually finds historical items that he collects. He takes these items home to his basement after receiving verbal consent from its owners. The picture Adam shared on Facebook is a part of his private collection. He is especially a fervent collector of those historical items that are related to the history of Auschwitz/Oświęcim and is therefore well known in the town and among some international specialized visitors. His collection is also the reason why Adam is one of the central and leading figures in the group of friends that I observed in the town in 2017.

In his group of friends, Adam is endowed with a lot of epistemic authority when it comes to the past of the town Auschwitz/Oświęcim. Adam was one of the initiators when, in 2016, the group started making an amateur film about the town. For the film, Adam directed the film, co-authored the scenario, delivered the historical material and artifacts from his collection, and played a lead role in the film. Since 2016, the group has made two more films about the history of the town. In both, Adam acted as the director and author of the scenario. In the Summer of 2017, I observed the filming of one of the two films. During this production, Adam was rarely challenged when it comes to his knowledge of the past.

He is also well versed in the different memories of Auschwitz/Oświęcim. He has frequent online and offline interactions with different groups and audiences that attribute different meanings to the sites in Auschwitz/Oświęcim, and is aware of various dominant political memory narratives among those audiences. He has contacts among the employees of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, with Holocaust survivors in Israel and the United States, with curators of Holocaust exhibitions, and with international collectors. This level of socialization in multiple contexts partly explains Adam’s flexible narration in the excerpt that I analyze further on in this article.

During this interview, Adam encountered me for the first time as someone who could ask critical questions. The role I was taking as an interviewer was different and more critically distant than the one I was taking as ethnographer earlier on in the research process. During my ethnographic observation, I was an accommodating and confirming group member, seldomly asking difficult questions. I demonstrate in my analysis of the segment that Adam is sometimes struggling to position me and my expectations, and to understand the norms governing our interaction. I believe that is because he had never experienced me in this more critical role. In another article (Van de Putte, 2021b, forthcoming), I introduce multiple examples of such changing positions and their narrative contents and forms in this interview with Adam. There, however, I don’t employ a micro-perspective as I do here.

Finally, I should mention that this interview was conducted in Polish. Adam does not speak or understand English. At the time, in 2018, I could understand everything Adam was saying in Polish. However, my spoken Polish had a lot of grammatical mistakes. I have chosen to transcribe those mistakes as they were made. The translation in the transcript itself was extensively checked by and discussed with Polish native speakers.

Analysis

During the first 45 seconds of the selected interaction, it is only the interviewer who is talking. I am asking Adam why he is giving more information to Poles than to “international” people in his Facebook post. I am also asking him why he writes just “Oświęcim” in Polish, but in English makes the distinction between the “town of Oświęcim” and the “German occupation of Auschwitz.” On the first sight, these questions seem innocent: I am describing what I see on the screenshot and ask Adam to explain. Adam verbally (“mhm,” “uhu”) confirms a few times that he understands what I am asking. But the way I pose my question is in fact setting the scene and is providing Adam with tools to construct different narratives in the rest of the interaction. In my question, I am already doing the interpretation of the audience segregation for him. I distinguish between Poles (his “friends” on Facebook) and “international people” (the members of the Auschwitz Study Group): “There is so much more information for the English, for the international people, than for Poles.” Adam will keep on using the distinction between those two groups throughout the interaction and will contrast them constantly as knowing different things about Auschwitz/Oświęcim.

Adam’s initial response to my question reflects on the co-text that I sketched before. He answers that he is not very active in the Auschwitz Study Group because his English is “zero.” However, from 1:00 minute into the interaction, he starts building his memory narratives. Adam first reflects on the way I segregated the audiences for him. He redefines the audience of “Poles” that I constructed before as “local,” “in Poland or in Oświęcim.” What Adam does here is equalizing a potential national audience with the local one of Auschwitz/Oświęcim. Adam also seeks my confirmation on this front by adding “right?” at the end of his sentences twice. I am giving him that confirmation by saying “yeah” (“no,” in Polish).

Then, Adam tells me what he assumes everybody in this audience “already knows” about the history of the town when he is sharing the picture:

What Adam does first in this fragment is establish the necessary epistemic authority for him to be able to tell the story. As mentioned before, questions of epistemic authority are key to narratives that don’t relate to personal experience (Norrick, 2013a, 2013b, 2020; Sacks, 1984: 424–426). Adam claims epistemic authority in multiple ways: first, by stating that all that needs to be known (“everything” in line 24) is known by the whole group (“everyone” in line 22). Second, by way of a first-person plural (“we” in line 24), he claims membership of that knowledgeable group from which his telling rights derive. In addition, Adam uses some words that highlight the obviousness and security of this knowledge (“already” in line 22, “and so forth” in line 23). There are some more indicators in this fragment that show that Adam is sure about the narrated knowledge he is sharing. They are reflected in various discursive and conversational features. He does not, for example, seek confirmation from the interviewer during the narration, while he was doing that before this fragment (“right?”). As a result, there are not many invitations from his side for me to be engaged in co-narration. We can see that Adam also does not anticipate much disagreement from my side and that he believes we share the same knowledge. The “and so forth” in line 23, for example, at least indicates that Adam thinks I know the rest of the story and that he does not need to tell it completely. Finally, the pace of his speech while telling the story is higher than in the rest of the utterance. All of those elements make me believe that he is telling something that does not need careful and conscious reflection and that he has told many times before (see Brubaker et al., 2004, for a discussion of such “automatic” responses).

Let me now zoom in on the narrative that Adam claims “everybody already is imagining” and that “we already know”: “The Germans, the camp, they took over the city threw out Poles and so forth.” The main actors in this story are “the Germans,” who took over the city and threw out the Poles, and the “Poles,” who are passive and were thrown out. Adam’s mention of “The camp,” without explaining what that may mean, seems to be connected to the other two actions “the Germans” took (taking over the city, throwing out the Poles). Adam ends his story with “and so forth.” He does not elaborate that, and I also don’t ask him to. Crucial for my interpretation is that Adam does not explicitly mention Jews or other victim groups as actors in the story. The role of Jews might have been assumed in the mentioning of “the camp” or in the “and so forth,” but Adam is not mentioning them explicitly. He only stresses the active role of the Germans and the passive role of the Poles.

These choices reflect largely a dominant, macro-political, and cultural narrative that is promoted by Catholic, Polish nationalist actors in the Polish public sphere. The events between 1939 and 1945 have been interpreted by dominant Polish actors in the wake of the recurring nationalist theme of Poland as “the Christ of the nations,” in which Poland is defined by its “intrinsic Catholicity” and “messianic martyrdom” (Zubrzycki, 2013: 111–113, 2016: 253). The obsession with innocence and victimhood is a key element in the Polish national identity narratives and discourses (Plonowska-Ziarek, 2007: 311). In these narratives, Jews, alongside other victim groups (Roma, homosexuals, for example), are generally absent, unless when they were rescued by “Righteous Poles” (Grabowski, 2016).

This borrowing from a dominant cultural narrative in an everyday, micro-interactional context is what is essentially “interscalar” about collective forms of memory. It demonstrates how more stable cultural knowledge informs narrated content and form, positionings, and identifications in everyday interactions. Elsewhere (Van de Putte, 2021a, 2021b forthcoming), I have argued that the interscalar mobility of cultural meanings does not solely happen from macro to micro, as appears to be the case in this example. Cultural memory narratives such as the one Adam brings up here are constantly being reactualized in everyday interactions. Structural changes to the interactional context can impact and change more macro-cultural meanings, and their narrative operationalizations.

At the end of this part of the exchange, Adam wants to continue his story, but I interrupt him. I ask him whether he really thinks that is what everyone knows.

This critical question is, I believe, crucial to the whole exchange. As mentioned before, Adam had always known me as a friendly acquaintance during my period of ethnographic fieldwork. Because the critical question comes so unexpectedly, Adam has to reposition me, my expectations, and the norms governing our interaction. From someone accepting and confirming Polish nationalist discourse, I change into a critical audience with different expectations. The concept of positioning that I use to analyze this part of the interaction is well researched in sociolinguistics. It was first conceptualized by Davies and Harré (1990: 48) as “. . . the discursive process whereby selves are located in conversations as observably and subjectively coherent participants in jointly produced storylines.” In the two decades following the publication of Davies and Harré, “positioning” has been developed further, especially by Bamberg (2003) and Georgakopoulou (2000, 2007), for whom positioning applies to “the resources or strategies by means of which the speaker’s selves are interactionally drafted, (re)fashioned and ultimately situated in language practices” (Georgakopoulou, 2007: 395). Narrative scholars in sociolinguistics have convincingly argued that “we manipulate story content to shape our current perspectives and relationships with the story-telling participants” (Norrick, 2020: 213). In short, the positioning concept allows for us to see how singular selves present themselves to others in a whole range of different ways, employing different cultural codes and narratives.

Such a (re)positioning is exactly what is happening at this moment in the interaction. After my question, Adam realizes that a different story than the one he is giving is required. But it takes time for Adam to formulate that story. He has to rethink the norms governing our conversation and reposition me as someone who expects another narrative than the one he just offered. This results in portions of speech which attest to a conscious repositioning on his part. To my question, he initially replied confidently, “I think that yes well because if they live here . . .” However, then the conversational data show that Adam starts doubting and is struggling to make up his mind. He needs about 10 seconds to start a new story. During these 10 seconds, the pace of his speech is slowing down, and at least three times Adam halts his own stream of thoughts:

Adam is struggling here to reestablish the epistemic authority and confidence that he performed before my critical interruption. While he was using plural pronouns before the critical question to talk about who knows, here he uses a less general first-person singular to express that only he thinks the people living in the town know the narrative of the past that he shared earlier. After an encouragement from my side (“Okay” in line 27), he moves from the first-person singular to a more confident third-person singular (“the majority” in lines 28 and 29) to talk about who knows. However, he doubtingly repeats the fact “the majority” knows three times, before he starts uttering a second narrative.

It should be stressed here that I am only able to interpret this repositioning as such because of the ethnographic data I have gathered in which Adam features. I have spent time with Adam and his friends over the course of 2017. During this period of observation, I have seen with which audiences they interact online and offline, which narratives they comfortably perform in these different contexts. During these observations, I have seen a few things that are relevant for my analysis here. First, as mentioned before, Adam’s epistemic authority is rarely challenged by other group members. Second, I have seen that Adam both masters the Polish nationalist narrative that I analyzed earlier and the more liberal narrative that is to follow. Only during my ethnographic fieldwork online and offline, Adam managed very well to segregate the audiences in front of which he is performing these two narratives. Finally, my own interactional history with Adam is a friendly, confirming one. All this ethnographic knowledge allows me to more confidently interpret this interactional struggle on the part of Adam as a repositioning of the norms of our interaction and a difficult reinterpretation of the expectations he thinks I have of him.

Then, after this episode of struggle, Adam starts the second version of the story. Again, Adam tells me what he believes everyone in Auschwitz/Oświęcim knows about the past of the town in the period between 1939 and 1945. But this version of the story is completely different from the first one. Now, it is not the Germans and Poles who are the central actors, but it is the Jewish past of the town that everybody is supposedly remembering. Adam explains that “the majority of people know that is was a Jewish small town as one could say.” He goes on explaining that about 50% of the inhabitants before the war were Jews. After having set the scene of Auschwitz/Oświęcim as a Jewish small town, he narrates the Second World War and the Holocaust:

The Germans invaded, removed all the Jews. A part of the Poles stayed on the outskirts of the town, but the Jews were forcefully removed “to the camps for the Holocaust and so forth.” Notice that not only Jews are new to the story. In this part of the story, the (Catholic) Poles also partly stayed in the town, while in the first narrative, they were “thrown out.” Differently from the first version of the story is also that it is the Jews who now occupy a passive role, not the Catholic Poles. In the second version, Jews “were resettled,” but Poles “survived,” while in the first version, Catholic Poles were “thrown out.”

While I characterized the first narrative as having components of macro-political nationalist narratives, the second narrative contains elements of a more liberal and progressive macro-political memory narrative. These narratives are more open to acknowledging the victim status of non-Catholic Poles and tend to discuss the agency of the actors during the Second World War and Holocaust as running less along simple ethnic lines. They also prioritize the Jewish past of and Jewish culture in prewar Poland in their narrations of the Polish past (Zubrzycki, 2012, see also Saxonberg and Waligorska, 2006, for a specific case study). I believe that after having repositioned me, Adam performs a more progressive, liberal memory narrative that centers Jews, the Jewish past, and Jewish victimhood which he assumes will restore the interactional working consensus between the two of us that was broken with my critical question. While before my critical interruption he could reiterate a more Polish nationalist version of the past, he has now reinterpreted the norms governing our interaction and gives a more liberal and progressive version of that same past.

This second narrative, compared with the first one, is also uttered in a different way. After repositioning me, Adam needs to do more conscious effort to formulate the story. This translates in more micro-pauses (indicated with (.) in the transcript) between parts of the story, more search for confirmation (“right”? in lines 35 and 36) from me, and more verbal expressions of conscious reflection (“uuuuuhm” in line 37):

At the end of his reiteration of version 2 of the story, Adam distances himself explicitly from Polish nationalist Holocaust memory narratives that focus on Catholic Polish victimhood and ignore the Jewish victims. He says that there are people who believe that “not only Jews were dying in the camp, only Poles, right?” Adam says that this is another topic and he seems to imply that it is understood that this narrative is obviously incorrect because “they (the Jews) are not there anymore”:

After having finalized his second narrative, Adam returns to the audience segregation that informed this exchange from the beginning: the difference between Polish and international audiences and their different knowledge about Auschwitz/Oświęcim. He says the “the tourist” (the equivalent of the international, English audience at the beginning of the exchange) has “no idea at all that this town existed,” while inhabitants are supposedly aware of this. During this argument, he summarizes the second version of the story twice more. First, he uses reported speech, or thought, to outline what “the majority” of locals knows: “aha there were Jews they are not here because the Germans as if took them for the Holocaust.” Then, a few second later, he says that those from abroad don’t know that “this was a town before the war and that they were living here during the period of occupation”:

“They were living” (żyli, in Polish) is a deictic reference to, probably, the local Polish Catholic population that lived in the town during the Nazi Occupation. Deictic references are references whose meanings can only be grasped from the non-textual context. They are references without clear referent in the text (Levinson, 2004; Wodak et al., 2009, for deixis in national(ist) discourses). The fact that Adam assumes I understand this deictic reference indicates that has regained some of his confidence about the fact that we, again, share a similar interpretative context and historical knowledge. Also his usage of pronouns is in line with this interpretation of regained confidence. Only once in this fragment does Adam uses a first-person singular to indicate who knows what. In the other cases, he uses third-person pronouns (e.g. “the majority,” “every other one” in line 48). I argue that Adam has now restored his position and confidence in the interaction, be it by offering a completely different cultural narration of the history of Auschwitz/Oświęcim.

Conclusion

Despite its limited scope, this micro-study enriched with ethnographic detail provides memory scholars with a few potential theoretical takeaways. First of all, the analysis of this 3-minute exchange demonstrates that people are flexible in the way they attribute meaning to the past. Adam managed to tell two very different versions of the story in a 3-minute exchange with me. To formulate those narratives, he drew from macro-cultural narratives that he has gotten to know in his various socialization contexts and from his contacts with the different visitors of his town. He reproduces and reactualizes these macro-narratives in everyday interactions. Researching the interscalar mobility of memory narratives—in this article mostly from macro to micro—in this way could assist an understanding of collective memory as relational. It allows us to see how the socially remembering self attributes meaning to the past as a result of its involvement in both macro and cultural contexts of socialization and of the structure of everyday interactional encounters. Such interscalar and relational approaches to memory could give memory scholars more epistemological ammunition to respond to critiques on the field that stress its lack of interest for individuals.

Second, the analysis demonstrates that the specific interactional context and the conversation itself can very often be facilitating such changes in the telling of memory narratives. In this exchange, I show how one critical question from my side leads to a process of repositioning on the side of Adam. I have argued that the reinterpretation of the norms and expectations on the part of the participants in the interaction is crucial in determining which memory narratives can and should be told. I believe memory studies scholars could focus more on interaction and its contexts to understand the dynamics of cultural and collective memory.

Third, Adam’s flexibility in moving between macro-cultural narratives in micro-interactional contexts can also tell us something about the meso-institutional level. Instead of internalizing and reproducing one memory narrative that is supported and promoted by one dominant political institution (the Polish state, for example), Adam moves between various different narratives, promoted by different institutions. Such interactional flexibility might make us shy away from overestimating the power of institutions in shaping and determining how people attribute meaning to the past in one singular way. This can be an interesting avenue for further exploration in contexts in which the state is heavily involved in polarized memory politics, such as in the case of Poland today. More qualitative research that takes into account the complexity of people’s everyday engagement with political content related to collective memory is needed here.

Finally, methodologically, a combination of micro-analysis with ethnographic work can also aid the recentering of the social self in memory studies. In this article, I have demonstrated that ethnographic detail can greatly enrich the interpretation of verbal data. Methodological reflections in the field should more often address the potential of combining verbal with nonverbal, observational data. In the introduction to this article, I hinted at a consideration of the work of Erving Goffman and linguistic ethnographers to start thinking about the integration of cultural and interactional approaches to the study of memory.