Life Stories and Self-Thematizations of Jehovah's Witnesses in the Context of Familial and Collective Persecution Under National Socialism

In the context of a multi-generational biographical study on stigmatized Nazi victim groupings in Germany and Austria, we conducted interviews in families in which family members were persecuted because they were members of the religious group of Jehovah's Witnesses. The sample includes cases where (almost) all family members have been part of this religious group for generations, families where only the persecuted persons were Jehovah's Witnesses, and families of persons who have left the community. One challenge presented by our study – and of biographical research on closed religious groups in general – is the reconstruction of experience structures. We see one reason for this in the shift in the “we-I” balance (Elias): in the interviews in families that have been integrated in the religious group for several generations, we clearly see that as their separation from the “outside” world increases, the we-I balance shifts in favor of the we. When talking about themselves and their family history, people then refer almost everything to the we-group. Only those biographical experiences are presented that can be linked to one's own religiosity or the religious community. Our hypothesis is that this phenomenon occurs when the we-group is the relevant instance of socialization across generations. The socialization framework is largely structured by the religiously based world view, and the strict group rules and assigned group roles based on it. Using an empirical case – a family – we will show what kind of biographical experiences lead to this form of self-thematization. However, we will also show how certain biographical and generational experiences make it possible to present other affiliations or ‘problematic’ topics. In the cases we have studied, this is related to the experience of persecution by the Nazis, and transmission of the fear of persecution within families and within the religious community.