Page - 55 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

In this paper I analyse the relationship between war trauma and transnational identity. My aim is to show how war trauma experienced by German families during WWII impacts on the identity formation of younger generations, in particular grandchildren with trans- national identity. Data is provided by interviews in Turkey in 2016, on 45 individuals with German mothers and Turkish fathers, aged between 17 and 75. Interviews focus on how members of the wartime generation conveyed their experiences and memories to their grandchildren and how traumatic legacy is interpreted by this transnational third genera- tion. How did the war affect the generation of mothers and grandmothers? How do grand- children interpret these generations’ memories of war? The paper thus seeks to understand both how war trauma reconstructed the cultural perspectives of the wartime generation itself, and what role the memory of war plays in the perspective of the third generation. Despite the numerous studies on the direct transmission of traumatic memory and identity, there has been only a limited amount of research on the indirect transmission of traumatic memory across multiple generations. An anthropological perspective is concer- ned not only with how the memory is recorded, but also how these records are transmitted. My first contribution is to problematize traumatic memory by observing it across three generations. This approach focuses on specifically female agency in the transmission of traumatic heritage / historical trauma. My second contribution is to present the relation between traumatic heritage and cultural identity within a trans-generational framework. Here, it needs to be recalled that the content of traumatic memory concerns not only to what is remembered, but also how those memories are transferred. My third contribution is to show how tendencies caused by wars are reproduced through these transnational identities. As the War unfolded, the experiences of German families formed a kind of family memory. The second generation of German women that came to live in Turkey by mar- riage to Turkish men reproduced their and their children’s war memories, thus reconstruc- ting their identities, even as they tried to leave those memories behind. Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal, Vol. 2 2016, 55-57 Peer reviewed article Open Access: content is licensed under CC BY 3.0 The grandchildren of war: A transgenerational perspective on traumatic memory Extended abstract Oya Topdemir Koçyiğit