Thank you for the introduction, Karin. This is more because you said your career is to hear where I'm at now. This is actually more of taking a little bit of deeper dive into more concrete passages of the interpretation workshops that I already did with some extracts of the conversation. So yes, here we go. Mother, Wife, Nazi. With this somewhat provocative title, I'm going to present part of my PhD research about my own family's ties to the National Socialist regime. Whereas some of my ancestors were part of the political elite during National Socialism, in this presentation, I will focus on how I investigated upon the writings of my grandmother, Camilla Nissen, Né Conti, who, at first sight, was less important for the German Reich. Aha, no? Aha, okay. So here you see her on the left next to her mother. Camilla was born in 1902 as a child of a newly divorced 19-year-old young woman, Nana Conti, who later became a midwife and ultimately the leading midwife of the Third Reich, the so-called Reichshebamführerin. In that position, Nana Conti was also responsible for the midwife's participation in the so-called child euthanasia. Camilla had two older brothers, and the three siblings all together became part of the nationalist youth movement. Their mother supported the anti-Semitic and nationalist political activism. Both of Camilla's brothers, Silvio and Leo, became early members of the NSDAP and took up leading positions locally and nationally. Silvio was the district administrator of Prenzlau, north of Berlin. Leonardo became Reichsgesundheitsführer, the health leader of the Reich. He was also responsible for forced sterilizations, abortions, and euthanasia. His involvement in human experiments is also undisputed. Both of them ended their lives with suicide. Camilla died in 1994 when I was seven years old. Camilla died in 1994 when I was seven years old. Unlike her closest family members, the youngest sibling, my grandmother, did not engage further in political activities after she married and had children. Yet, she continued to be a staunch supporter of Hitler and National Socialism. Camilla left behind autobiographical texts, socialism. Camilla left behind autobiographical texts, a memoir, and a diary written between April and July of 1945, her so-called flight diary. As she noted in the writing itself, the memoir was written between August 1969 and August 1971. It was originally intended only for the closest family circle. On the front page, the sentence, Für meine Kinder, for my children, appears as what one could read as the title of her memoir. As I know from my father, she made her children promise to never publish the text. I do not know of her motivation to ask for this promise but I assume that she might have thought that it could be of interest to historians at some point or that she wanted to make sure that her children would not face any trouble because of their then deceased high-ranking Nazi family members. Or, she must, sorry, not or, and, she must have been aware that some of her statements and formulations about Jews, disabled people, and National Socialism in general would have caused great offense in the German political climate of the early 1970s, which was marked by the worldwide leftist protests of 1968. Her memoirs give an account of her entire life. As you can see here, she begins with a short history of her mother's life, then focuses on her own and as well as those of her children. She ends her writing by addressing her children again, asking them to stick together and help each other wherever you can. The second text, her diary, is titled Flucht aus Mellensee, Flight from Mellensee. Camilla refers to it herself in the memoir where she states, I quote, My diary notes of our flight, of our stay in Stocksee in Schleswig-Holstein. It begins on the 21st of April, so I don't need to write anything about it here. My flight diary ends at the time when Robert and I found each other again. Hence, within the family, the diary has been referred to as flight diary. Robert, who she mentions, was my grandfather, the husband of Camilla. But the version of the diary that I possess does not end with the reunion of the two, which means that parts of the original diary must be missing. Originally, it consisted of a collection of handwritten sheets of paper that my grandmother had mostly kept together until her death. Both texts by Camilla, the memoirs and the diary, were transcribed from the original, as you can see in the earlier image as well. The original was written in the old German script Zütterlin and then copied for distribution, and then the transcript was copied for distribution within the family. The transcriptions into an easier-to-read script were made by the mother of the separated husband of one of my aunts, quite far out. I do not know why she was chosen for this task. I don't know who initiated the process, and I don't know who was actually in the beginning responsible for the distribution. Also, I've never actually seen the original writing. So by this, I mean to say that there is a distinct possibility that some parts are different from the original transcripts, and that things might have been left out, or that additional information might have been added. Being a descendant of perpetrators from National Socialism and the granddaughter of an active supporter of the Nazis, I am also implicated. For Michael Rothberg, I quote, an implicated subject is neither a victim nor a perpetrator, but rather a participant in histories and social formations that generate the positions of victim and perpetrator, and yet in which most people do not occupy such clear-cut roles. Less actively involved than perpetrators, implicated subjects do not fit the mold of the passive bystander either. subjects do not fit the mold of the passive bystander either. Although indirect or belated, their actions and inactions help produce and reproduce the positions of victims and perpetrators, end quote. I could be described as such a belated, implicated subject. For many years, my inactions, so me continuing the family's silence about its historical entanglements with National Socialism, made me somewhat complicit in the violence perpetrated by Nana, Leonardo, and Silvio Conti, with the unconditional backup of my grandmother Camilla. Through my project that I present today, I hope to transgress this position, in which my actions or inactions continue to reproduce historical violence. Not with the aim of reconciliation, but with the unconditional desire to take a personal stance and to take my family history as a starting point for discussions about contemporary history and current socio-political challenges. Discussions that I hope will not stop at fact-checking and speaking about historical context, but that enable a confrontation of the continuation of historical thought patterns and emotional heritage in a way that focuses on affects and emotions. The goal with this work is toward a different, relatable kind of remembrance, one that speaks directly to its audience. Focusing on the psychosocial reverberations of having perpetrators from National Socialism in one's family, my research investigates if it is possible to uncover inherited feelings, Gefühlserbschaften in German. In this project, these Gefühlserbschaften are understood as affects and emotions that have been passed on from former generations. These, in my case, could be feelings of shame in the face of the violence perpetrated by my family members, or a sense of responsibility toward the family not to speak about the perpetrators in order to protect them from prosecution. Ambivalences are omnipresent. In a second step of this artistic research project, I set out to inquire about different aesthetic decisions of how to make visible, audible, and tangible the uncovered effective entanglements and historical patterns of thought and how they can influence the interpretation of one's family's role in National Socialism as well as the effects of the inherited feelings might have had on one's own life. I approached writing by my grandmother Camilla with the Deutungswerkstatt. This is a conversational method that has its origins in the field of ethno-psychoanalysis. The German adjective Deuten means to interpret, so I translated the methodology to interpretation workshop. to interpret. So I translated the methodology to interpretation workshop. With his book Anxiety and Method in the Behavioral Sciences, Georges de Verreux thought together psychoanalysis and ethnography and thus founded the field of ethno-psychoanalysis. It is concerned with the emotional attachment of the researcher to her field or her research material. The field was strongly influenced by the work of Swiss researchers such as Paul and Goldie Perrin-Matthei, Mario Ertheim and Mayer-Nadig. Their work was motivated by the thesis that it was possible to liberate the psychoanalytic method from its purely therapeutic properties and instead develop methods to use it beyond the study of mental illness to the study of cultural developments and phenomena. In short, psychoanalysis from a psychoanalytic perspective is concerned with the reactions of the field worker in the field and argues that the unconscious inner reactions that occur should be considered as research findings that say something about the difference between the researcher and her field. Therefore, they can be important information and further used as valid material and results in the process of knowledge production within a specific research project. Besides publishing broadly on feminist issues in the field of ethnography, aforementioned Maja Nadek developed the methodology of the interpretation workshop in the 1990s, whilst being a professor of European ethnography and cultural sciences at the University of Bremen in Germany. The method was initially conceived to analyze text-based ethnographic research material, so-called thick descriptions. These could be transcribed interviews, field notes, or excerpts of field diaries. For NADIC, field research is a field of interaction, in which data is collected through a series of encounters between the researcher and the informant. The interpretation workshop thus recognizes this relational and processual nature of field research and its evaluation. The evaluation of field research thus concerns a variety of social and content-related levels which formed and still form the framework for the research process. The social dynamics that have developed in this field of tension and continue to develop during the evaluation are of central interest. The interpretation workshop aims to explore these unconscious dynamics, taking into account the social and cultural differences of the participants in the group. I quote, through the different methodological steps of the interpretation workshops, from the first effective reactions such as emotions or images that come up to the linking of these emotional irritations with concrete text passages and situations found in the research material to the linking of the different reactions with the personal history of the individual participants, the emotional is linked to the cultural. This method is not a method that is of spoken word only. It is not only what is spoken by the participants in the group that is considered as a result. In addition to the emotional and intellectual analysis of the given material, the dynamics that develop in the group or between individual group members are also as read as a manifestation of what is implicit in the research material. For example, if the material is an interview, this might be an inner conflict of the interviewee, which manifests itself in the interpretation workshop as a conflict between two participants. So, the first series of interpretation workshops in my project took place in 2020. The workshops were part of my fellowship for art and theory at the KünstlerInnenhaus Buxenhausen in Innsbruck in Austria. They were led by Professor Jochen Bonz and I found the participants for the conversations through an open call that was distributed in Innsbruck and the area of Tyrol with the help of the institution. 11 people responded to the call and all of them eventually took part in the workshop. So you can imagine how that works with an open call. The group was relatively homogeneous. It consisted of 10 women and one man aged between 23 and 67, nine of whom were either students or had already completed academic training, two of whom had attended art academies in Austria. All of the participants were white, only one participant did not have Austrian roots. Before the group came together, there were preparatory individual meetings with each of them, either in person or by phone, during which they could ask questions. The group gathered on two weekends in 2020. On each day of these weekends, two interpretation workshops took place. All in all, four extracts of each of the diary and the memoir of Camilla were interpreted. In total, 12 hours of conversation were documented with several audio recorders. Afterwards, I transcribed the recordings. Most of the participants felt ambivalent about exposing themselves to historical content that contained explicit National Socialist and anti-semitic language, And most of them linked this ambivalence to their own family history. Being conflicted in their perceptions of their family's position and role in Nazism, they seemed to feel reluctance to label their ancestors as either victims or perpetrators. At the same time, it appeared that they felt the need to do so in order to be able to identify either with or against their deceased family members. Most of them struggled to understand and reconcile the ambivalence within themselves. Already in the individual conversations before the common interpretation and then later in the workshops themselves, it became clear that these ambivalences were shaped by different histories, very much depending on the age of the participants. The older participants had mostly gone through a process similar to mine, in which the sense of a coherent family memory had at some point been disrupted by new factual knowledge about their ancestors. For some, the then fragmented understanding of their family history as an individualized memory was troublesome. Others had accepted the sometimes contradictory stories and historical facts about their ancestors. Most of them had found a clear positioning for themselves as descendants of perpetrators, but were still emotionally charged about the issue. The younger ones had not gone through a process like that. They had always been conflicted about how to perceive their family history as belonging to either the perpetrators or the victims. Most of them were unsure how to position their families, but emotionally they were much more distant from the issue. Discussed in the interpretation workshop, this was explained by the generational gap and the different temporal distances of their life experiences with National Socialism. In the beginning of the second conversation, participant A of the group stated, I noticed something very strong, especially with you who are younger. It seemed rather positive to me, but it seemed to me that you don't have this, you're much more distanced. It would be more a question of whether you also feel a reverberation in the family, yes, or whether for you it's already the great grandparents, that was a long time ago, and I go to university and there I can deal with it and so on. And you have a distant view. The younger participants responded to this, both in a way agreeing, but also explaining their more distanced way of discussing the topic in terms of different reasons, class and nationality. Yes, what it was, what it is for me as well, maybe that I perceive it differently. For me, these people are rich. They live in a town. They have a maid there. They have Biedermeier furniture that they have to look after. And my grandparents were still farmers. So it is, we have no family history. And there are a handful of photos, so to speak, of my great-grandmother, who should be the same age here. My grandmother didn't write anything down, so we have stories that she told orally. But the more often you remember them, the more you change them, because you didn't write them down. And that's why, for me, it is a different world, with maids and all this furniture. Participant C. Hmm. I have the feeling that I have to make a confession. Because your diagnosis was quite correct, I personally don't really have a connection to, neither through my family or personally, to National Socialism. I've been living in Austria for seven years now. I'm originally from Romania. These reflections show the importance of having a diverse group of people as part of the workshops, as with that comes a more layered and faceted reflection on the text. For example, the issue of class had not occurred to me to be very prominent in the material, yet by the remark of participant B, and also reactions to that then later on, it was brought up as an interesting and important aspect of the text material. Also, the person from Romania later in the conversation began speaking about the entanglements between Romania and the National Socialist regime, realizing that there is actually a connection. Another topic that was very prominent in the interpretations by the group and became the main driver for the creative rendering of the conversations was the ambivalence that the participants felt towards the author of the text. That if she had been born in a different family, she might have been a resistance fighter. But I think it's always both. Every person has individual traits, and every person is unthinkably connected to their time and their environment. And what comes out is a mixture of parts. The proportions vary, but of both. I think it's very difficult to separate oneself from one's socialization, but it was precisely her lively, interested and committed nature that was certainly her individual traits, but where it then led to was certainly very much the socialization. That's how I would say it now. much the socialization. That's how I would say it now. One could read these lines as a very clear excuse of my grandmother's stark National Socialist convictions. That is the one thing, but I also believe that it shows that the group really tried to understand her reasoning for becoming a Nazi. Participant F. I was also thinking yesterday whether you can make a decision at all then. Apart from what the environment does to you, can you really stand up to it? Can you be so cool, so objective, that the people around you have nothing? Nothing. What is good and evil? Nothing to this. So whether there is an inner balance that you can fall back on. The concept of the perpetrator's family got stuck in my head. I thought to myself that it's reciprocal. You are so strongly connected to the family that you feel responsible, but vice versa, that you also try to understand it. Or yes, these tensions, the family simply, that a young girl, what are her possibilities? This short excerpt begins with what needs to be read as an excuse, I think, that the author of the text, my grandmother, really had no other choice than to become a Nazi. my grandmother really had no other choice than to become a Nazi. Later on, the participant describes very clearly also the ambivalence with which the group read the text. At the same time, they describe the ambivalence that I felt and sometimes feel when dealing with the texts. And this is why I'm taking this ambivalence as the main topic today, because I think it is a very important thing to recognize that this ambivalence exists. or having it as a question that can be, let's say, that can force you into a discussion that brings up a duality. And I think that's not productive for this kind of memory. And it's also a great example of how the interpretation workshop can work, that the participants both speak for themselves and make it possible to detect potential underlying issues felt by the person whose material is being analyzed. This ambivalence is one of the main aspects, not the main aspects, but one of the aspects that I gave some space when I wrote a fictionalized script based on the conversations and transferred them into a performative walk and a three-channel video installation. As I do not have the time here to go further into these artworks, I installed the documentation of the video installation here outside in the hall room, and you can watch it there, and I'm happy to discuss any questions about it, of course. And for the people following online, if you want to see more of it, please just contact me directly. This is it for now. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you so much for this. I mean, you came to the point quite straightforward straightforward but I'm sure there's a lot of question that are still open and I think you also opened you also finished your talk with opening the discussion so it's a good way to do it I guess is there already something some question I mean I could probably start with asking you a bit more straightforward what do you think you could find out about those texts and also about your relation to these texts with the workshop that you could not have found out without. Can you point to that a little bit more? I mean, you gave us some hints, for example, the class issue, the ambivalence as such, but I guess there's more to say about that. Yes, I mean, how to put that? So I think the whole process of opening or of organizing these kind of conversations made it possible for me to actually read the text properly, I would say, because it was so forbidden in the family that I felt even like to speak about it that it felt even I don't know that that it even felt wrong for me to think about it somehow um and and so I mean that sounds very basic and it is somehow but I I don't think it's um I don't think this is a very special experience. I think it's very common. So I would begin by answering like that. And in then that process of reading it properly and actually giving myself more permission to dig into it, I think recognizing the ambivalence and accepting that it is ambivalent, that my feelings may be ambivalent, that was a major part. And that became, for me, something that happened through the group conversations, but that also happened in other conversations that I had in the working group for the intergenerational consequences of the Holocaust, which I'm a member of, and that brings together descendants of perpetrators and descendants of victim of national socialism. And I had these conversations within this working group before doing the interpretation workshops. But I think they go hand in hand somehow. Thanks. Alison was first. So it's not that the two of us are having a conversation. We're having a conversation with you. Thank you, Lena, for a fantastic talk. It's really, really so interesting on so many levels. I was thinking, we're sitting in this contested building, and this event is constructed in part around that. And coming into Linz, there was lots of FPU posters. And it struck me, this is probably a bit of a cliche question. Is there a difference between the way Germany and Austria has handled these forbidden topics not just internally within families but more generally because it struck me that the kind of methodology you're describing would be actually really useful to open up conversations about really recent history that appears to be completely unprocessed on the micro and macro level in Austria? That's a little bit of a hard question for me to answer, but it's a good one, of course. So in terms of what happens within families, I can only speak of a research project by someone I know and their research kind of results in the same or in similar conclusions that it is exactly not spoken about, that it's either clearly forbidden or that there is like in my family like you're not allowed like you're not supposed to speak about this and it should never be published right um and then in other families it's much more implicitly like just as a common in the families that it's just it's clear that you don't speak about it nobody has to even mention that you don't speak about it that's has to even mention that you don't speak about it. That's the most common, I think. And in terms of more institutionalized remembrance, I don't know that much about how Austria, I'm just not super professional about the work that is done here in Austria. So I wouldn't like lean out and do a comparison. So Anna, but I'm yeah, one second. Just to enter this conversation on this point, not as a solution or as an explanation, but it's quite interesting that you're using a method that was developed from psychoanalysis, so Austrian method. And also this conversation was with people from Austria. So I think it's quite an interesting question what that does to your material, because it has, of course, something to do with the specific way of Austria of Austria not dealing with National Socialism until the 1990s like in on a very strange level this feeds now into your into your interpretation work that's quite interesting I think would probably be very different if the work the workshop would have taken place in Leipzig or in Hamburg yeah that's only comment Anna and then Mariette thank you I have a rather formal question also about the interpretation workshop. You read to us this, some of the documentation you have, some statements from participants, and it's clear that you have important reflections stemming from these different interpretations of the material from your family members. And I wonder formally, how permeable do you make your research to the results of this interpretation workshops? Because of course you have a expose and you have a architecture taught for your research project. And I wonder, for example, with this statement of Romania, if this makes you also change this architecture and go towards some thoughts on entangled history or this question of class. I know you also have a film project where you also address this question of the flight in Germany and regaining privileges from before this question of the flight in Germany and regaining privileges from before the end of the war. I just wonder like how plastic is your research to the results of the interpretation workshop? Yes, I see. It is. I think one important aspect that I mean, that I also pointed out today is that the way that I found the group, of course, is a little bit complicated, let's say. And so is the makeup of the group, right? So for the next interpretation workshops, I'm doing a much more curated group, which also has a huge ton of problematic questions to it, obviously. But it will be a more curated group that speaks together. And that is exactly because it became so clear that there are many, many aspects that were not touched upon that are definitely in the material, some of which that I feel like I have an idea of and others that I probably have no idea of. I would just answer to the first question one more thing, actually, because one aspect to the texts that I hadn't really thought of was the text as text. And that became something very clear also in the interpretation workshop that they started speaking about different symbols that come back again and again. And for example, the water, when is water spoken about and stuff like that. And that was a way of reading the text that i had not done um at all um yeah sorry i mixed this it's marielle and then thank you lena for your very interesting talk um yeah I wanted to ask you more about the methodology because I find it very interesting how you came to this method and if you could say more about that. And also, like, now you're working with the interpretation workshop, but if you are also planning or during your work, also you have realized there are some limitations but if you are also planning or doing your work, also you have realized there are some limitations to the method that you can compensate through other, or work around through also other approaches, and which would be. So mostly about this, how you plan these workshops and how you like got to to this specific way of working which I find super interesting well the way of working um because uh a big thank you to the um recently Professor Marie-Louise Angerer, who was my professor at the Academy of Media Art in Cologne, and I did experimental films traveling in Colombia on an exchange that Karin organized. And then speaking about Marie-Louise, speaking with Marie-Louise about this, she pointed me to adenopsychoanalysis and she just was like, okay, so I think this will be interesting to you. And then she just mentioned a bunch of names and titles and I wrote them down and this is basically how I came to it. And she was very right in her observation that that might be something interesting to me and so yeah and then I just kind of dig deeper into it and at some point I went to Maya Nadek and looked up what she had done and I found this interpretation workshop and it just spoke to me very intuitively but that was already in 2014 so long before I started the project and I always had in mind that I wanted to do something with it, but it didn't really fit into what I was doing at the moment. And then when I got these memoirs in 2015, at some point, or even not then, it was actually later, it was like in 18 probably only, that it kind of struck me that this is the material that I'm going to use this method for that has intrigued me for many years. So it's a bit of a funny coming together somehow. And in terms of the limits of the workshop, for me, I think they lie in the artistic potential somehow, because it is a bit hard for me, I think, because I find it so important to give voice to the people that speak in the group. How do I add a more artistic, poetic layer somehow? I find that very challenging. It's very hard for me to give myself freedom to be playful with the material. So I'm doing this film project in which I will work again with the interpretation workshop, but there will be other material coming into it. And then I'm also working on a exhibition project for the next year where I'm gonna look into much more specific the role of the midwives. Looking at the, not looking at Nana Conti that much, actually, but more also going into my own emotional and let's say poetic reactions to that because I became a mother one year ago during which I mean I worked on this project so it has become I don't know my emotions toward the work of midwives have changed, obviously. My experience is a different one than before. So it's going to be about midwives more, and it's going to move away from the interpretation workshop. Georgia. I would have been interested to hear more how your research and also the artistic output feeds back into your own family and if has has this sparked any new way of memorizing or any discussions and emotions? Well, it has definitely sparked emotions. And I have to say, to my luck, mostly positive ones. There was a reluctance in the beginning, but now mostly there is a positive attitude toward me doing this project. Besides one person who doesn't want to speak about that, about my work at all. So that's not speaking about my work for a lot of years then i guess but i have not given up hope because i still think that these kind of processes are processes and they can take a long while so i would not say that i will never speak to the person about the project you never know and yeah that's probably it very sure no was there a second part of the question no yes I feel like there was something what did you also think about doing a workshop situation with your family no I clearly did not because I don't want it to be, I don't know, for me it's an artistic project also, right? It's a conceptual project, let's say. And it's a conceptual project and it's a project for me, basically. But it doesn't have to be for the whole family. It's okay if it's just mine. And I'm very happy about the support of my parents for the project and they might be following, I think. As usual when I speak and so yeah. I think there's a comment in the chat, right? Yes, there is one question from Katharina Rosenbichler. She's asked... Say hi to Katharina. Okay. Will you hand your personal archive to an institutional archive in the future? For example, in the form of a commented version of your grandmother's flight diary? That's a very good question. And the idea is to do so. And I've been in contact for this with a historian and the head of the documentation center in Krefeld. But it has kind of, there was a beginning of, yeah, let's do this. And then I mean, many other things happened and COVID happened. And so it would be it would take a renewed effort to get it started. But it is my wish to do exactly that. And I think I'm also quite happy that it kind of that it didn't happen at that point, actually, that I didn't give it out of hand and said okay you can just do it now because now I have a better understanding and now I have also more um or ideas what I will find important about how it should happen or who should be commenting on it um I think and um so, this is something that I hope to be doing in the future, but not right now. Yeah. Let me just come back to the methodology just for a last reflection, because I mean, the psychoanalytic setting, it was invented in order for ethnographers or anthropologists to dive into their own prejudices or into their own stereotypes or into their own prerequisites when it comes to studying a different culture. So now you're kind of you're taking this method to look at your own culture? Question mark. So that's a quite an interesting move, I would say. And this makes me repeat my questions of what stereotype or what? What did you discover about your, I don't know, prejudice about the time of National Socialism that you would not have found out without it? Because this is, I mean, this is what it is all about, to kind of uncover hidden or unknown patterns in your own way of dealing with issues. Yes, I understand. I think for me before doing that, it was always very clear. I mean, when I when I first learned about the National Socialist history of my family, I was 14 years old with the flight diary and an oral oral history for my father and then many years later in 2015 I had this this memoir in my hands and in between that internet came up and I had moments of deep diving into family history. And for me, really until I allowed myself to read it differently, it was very clear for me that I came from a family of perpetrators and Nazis and that they were horrible people and that there was no way that I would ever want to, that I was happy that I had not the chance to speak to them ever because it would be impossible to speak to them. We are so far apart politically that we would not be able to have a conversation that was my um I don't know if you would call it a prejudice but that was my um position toward this family history and that's also why I put the ambivalence um as an important point because ambivalence as an important point because yeah that there was something else I wanted to say no but I forgot from earlier sorry yeah I know I'm sorry I do want to say because to that no to to the question also the the method is not made to look at historical material at all and um i recently wrote an article about that um and why it is possible to use it i think and or why it is productive um in in the specific case to to use it for the historical material and it will be published hopefully end of the year. Let's see. Yeah, exactly. So more then. Thank you. So thanks a lot for this first talk, Lina. Thank you, everybody.