Page - 56 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

56 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2016Oya Topdemir Koçyiğit | Savaşın torunları : Travmatik belleğe kuşaklar ötesi bir bakış The Turkish-German third generation are privileged to be able to live their lives both in Germany and in Turkey. This generation is particularly interested in family history. Their German mothers’ cultural adaptation to Turkey was mostly somewhat painful. This may have contributed to the emergence of the traumas of their mothers, who gene- rally wished to remain silent. The majority of individuals interviewed thought that their mothers’ experience of the aftermath of the war had deepened their trauma. New traumas resuscitated old ones. The Turkish-German third generation frequently came across WWII in social envi- ronments. Especially during childhood, from close relatives on their father’s side, from peers and even teachers, they were subject to marginalizing labels such as giaour (“infi- del”), “German seed”, or “Nazi”. Both their mother’s adaptation difficulties and/or their experience of degrading speech aroused their interest in their German family’s histories of war, prompting them to ask such questions like: “What did my family witness?”; “What do they think about these experiences?”; and “How do they make sense of the War?” The experience of transnational identity has intensified the grandchildren’s curiosity about family history. Their attempt to scrutinize the past has caused parts of the war memory to resurface. The study reveals that the German families try to hide the memory of war or experiences of Nazism from their grandchildren. The first reaction the grand- children meet as they search for the war memories of their family elders is usually silence. This strategy of staying silent is adopted as a means of self-preservation. The war experience also reshaped the habitus of German families. Here, the details distilled from the memory of family members and transferred to subsequent generations are of great importance. The majority of the families experienced pain and poverty during and after the War. Families endured traumatic events such as death, deprivation, injury and mutilation. Resulting in physical and mental injury, these events opened up a trauma- tic space in the memory of German families. Looking at how this memory is transmitted, it is striking that grandchildren seem to find that it is women rather than men who are willing to talk about the war. Masculine memories of Nazism tend to be repressed. It is women that rewrite and reproduce family history, thus conveying it into the present. Ger- man women are subjects that create a history as a history. The content of what is being transmitted has a theme of victimisation, however is reframed by struggle. The War has now been justly dealt with, after a struggle with the injustice it brought. The study demonstrates major changes in habits, understandings and relationships in families that endure the trauma of war, and in certain everyday practices such as social and domestic relations, social status, class, possessions and estate inheritance. In other words, the victimizing factor of war altered the conception of the world and ethics. War memory is a reference for subsequent generations’ quest for a stronger stance on the path of life. War memory is very important in the development of the cultural capital of the third generation. In trying to understand the wartime past of their families, grandchildren have tried to discover the meaning of being German. Throughout this process, they have recon- sidered the social relations, values and behaviour both of their German parents and them- selves. Grandchildren come up with new strategies after having contact with these reper- toires of war. Children have been able to develop new strategies by deduction. No matter