Giving an Account of Inherited Pasts: Memory, Ethics, and Relationality in Postgeneration Memoirs

Abstract

The aim of this article is to provide a new theoretical and methodological framework for analyzing the ethical, relational, and normative dimensions of transgenerational memory work, taking a comparative close reading of two Norwegian second-generation Holocaust family memoirs, Irene Levin’s Vi snakket ikke om Holocaust (2020) and Bjørn Westlie’s Fars krig (2008), as its case in point. Both narratives are simultaneously biographies, autobiographies, and historiographies, and they mediate between family memory and national memory. The authors position themselves as second-generation descendants, addressing and being addressed by their parents, and as Holocaust researchers, addressing and being addressed by a public audience. Departing from the theoretical perspective of relational life writing and Judith Butler’s concepts “scene of address” and “frameworks of recognition”, this comparative literary analysis of rhetorical situations, genres, and modes of narrating discusses the author-narrators’ engagement with their parents’ silence and writings and reveals how personal histories intersect with collective reckoning. By attending to the relational and performative aspects of storytelling, this article highlights how postgeneration literature enacts ethical reflection, recognition, and accountability.

1. Introduction

“the ‘I’ has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation—or set of relations—to a set of norms”

Judith Butler

This article examines the family memoir as a narrative resource for navigating the ethical, relational, and normative dimensions of memory among the descendants of both victims and perpetrators of mass violence. Its case in point is two Norwegian second-generation Holocaust family memoirs: Bjørn Westlie’s (b. 1949) Fars krig (Westlie 2008) and Irene Levin’s (b. 1943) Vi snakket ikke om Holocaust: Mor, jeg og tausheten (Levin 2020).1 Upon the books’ publication, the authors were well known in Norway as public intellectuals and Holocaust researchers: In the early 2000s, Levin, as a Jewish activist and a social-work scholar, contributed to commemoration activities and published several academic articles focusing on topics such as silent Jewish family memory and children’s war experiences (see Levin 2001, 2006). Westlie, Historian and journalist, played a key role in increasing public attention to Norwegian authorities’ looting of Jewish property during and after the war. In his 1995 newspaper article, “Norwegians robbed the Norwegian Jews”, and subsequent writings, Westlie agitated for the authorities’ need to recognize Norwegian participation in the Holocaust and compensate the Norwegian Jews for their economic losses (Storeide 2019, p. 466). Both memoirs received considerable attention. They were not merely read as family history but recognized as important contributions to expanding the public historical understanding of the war and its aftermath.2

In Norwegian WWII memory culture, Holocaust memory—encompassing both the memories of the persecuted Norwegian Jews and Norwegian participation in the perpetrations—long remained marginalized in the public discourse. The dichotomy between “good” Norwegians and “evil” Nazi occupiers shaped a persistent master narrative that dominated the collective imaginary (A. Eriksen 1995). Only from the 1990s onward did this master narrative expand to include Holocaust memory and recognize the state’s and its citizens’ participation in Nazi genocide (Bruland and Tangestuen 2011; Reitan 2015; Storeide 2019). The ongoing expansion of Holocaust memory in Norway provides a crucial context for both Fars krig and Vi snakket ikke om Holocaust, which not only tell the stories of two individuals experiencing mass violence but also represent two social groups that had existed at the margins of Norwegian WWII remembrance for a long time: the Norwegian Eastern Front fighters and the Norwegian Holocaust survivors. Westlie’s father, Petter Westlie (1919–2011), enlisted for the Waffen SS at the age of twenty-two and fought as a soldier in Ukraine during Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941–1942. He was convicted in the Norwegian post-war treason trials and served his sentence before reuniting with his wife and starting a family. Levin’s mother, Fanny Levin (1912–2013), fled with her husband to Sweden in 1942 to avoid the systematic deportation of Norwegian Jews to Auschwitz–Birkenau carried out by the occupying power and the Norwegian state. Upon the family’s return to Oslo in 1945, Fanny had to face a radically altered everyday life in a small Jewish community mourning the deaths of friends and family members, including her own father.

Writing as the children of a front fighter and a Holocaust survivor, respectively, the authors of the two family memoirs engage with very different wartime experiences and postwar discourses. However, from the perspective of literary analysis, the works share three distinctive features that make them an interesting case for comparison: First, the authorial position is dual—both authors write as the adult child of an aging or deceased parent who experienced the mass violence of WWII and as a specialist who has engaged with the topic in public and academic debate. Second, the texts have similar narrative structures, with three interrelated stories: a biographical account of the author’s father or mother, focusing on the war years and the early postwar period; an (auto)biographical account of the author’s life, emphasizing the parent–child relationship; and a frame narrative that recounts the process of writing the memoir—a process that, for both authors, involves engaging with their parent’s written voices and breaking a silence. Third, both memoirs enact a dynamic relationship between family memory and national memory discourses, scrutinizing how personal histories intersect with public reckoning in the dynamic and still ongoing formation of a Norwegian Holocaust memory.

Let us clarify that our purpose is not to relativize perpetrator and victim experiences. It is neither intended to question historical causality nor assign guilt or responsibility. Our point of departure is that, despite the one engaging with the perpetrator and the other with victim experiences, Westlie’s and Levin’s family memoirs both fall under the rubric of second-generation Holocaust literature (McGlothlin 2006). According to Erin McGlothlin, this body of literature is written by (or from the perspective of) children who share an existential premise:

The children of the victims and perpetrators alike grew up with the simultaneous presence and absence of Holocaust memory in their everyday family lives, and thus feel profoundly stamped by its legacy. Just as the identity of their parents is defined largely with reference to their experiences of those dark years between 1933 and 1945 (specifically, with regard to whether they created the darkness or were overcome by it), so too the children construct their own identity in relation to the Holocaust.

(McGlothlin 2006, p. 8)

Westlie and Levin examine this “Holocaust stamp” as silent or repressed memories, and related experiences of social marginalization, at the intersections of family memory and publicly acknowledged national memories of WWII. By engaging, as middle-aged adults, with their aging parents’ written notes, however, both authors move beyond inherited silence and toward a renewed understanding of a shared past. Fars krig and Vi snakket ikke om Holocaust can thus be read as narratives that articulate a broader and revised understanding of the war. For both authors, breaking the silence entails transgressing established familial norms by bringing unspoken personal and family memories into the public sphere. Their respective accounts are simultaneously shaped by, and in dialogue with, broader societal frameworks that structure perpetrator and victim narratives.

The aim of this article is to provide a new theoretical and methodological framework for analyzing the ethical, relational, and normative dimensions of inter- and transgenerational memory work in postgeneration literature. We depart from a notion of “relational life writing” and base our comparative literary analysis of the two family memoirs’ rhetorical situations, generic features, and modes of narrating in concepts from Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself (2005/2025). Butler does not explicitly engage with second-generation Holocaust literature. However, her theory of relational subject formation provides a fruitful and understudied perspective on the works’ complex engagement with Holocaust memory. By bringing Butler’s concepts “scene of address” and “framework of recognition” into dialogue with theories of life writing, we approach the family memoirs as performative acts that mediate between private and public spheres, familial and national histories, and ethical and affective economies of remembrance.

This article consists of four sections: (1) an introduction to the project and its case; (2) a presentation of the theoretical framework, namely, the concepts of “relational life writing” (Eakin 1999; Popkin 2015), “scene of address,” and “framework of recognition” (Butler [2005] 2025); (3) a comparative close-reading analysis of Fars krig and Vi snakket ikke om Holocaust; and (4) a concluding discussion, suggesting how a Butler-informed approach may open new perspectives on postgeneration narratives across generations and memory cultures.

2. A Butlerian Life-Writing Approach to Postgeneration Memoirs

Postgeneration family memoirs—whether written from a second- or third-generation perspective or even beyond—constitute a fundamentally relational discourse. The concept of “relational life writing” emerged in the 1980s within feminist autobiographical theory as a critique of the dominant Western conception of autobiography, which assumes that self-presentation requires an autonomous and sovereign self (Smith and Watson 2017, p. xxiii). Instead, relational life writing builds on a model of identity that understands selfhood as co-constructed and shaped through relationships with others, particularly within familial contexts (Eakin 1999, p. 57). As John Paul Eakin observes, relational narratives “defy the boundaries we try to establish between genres, for they are autobiographies that offer not only autobiography of the self but the biography and the autobiography of the other” (Eakin 1999, p. 58, italics in original). Fars krig and Vi snakket ikke om Holocaust exemplify this hybrid genre, blending elements of biography, autobiography, and historiography. This blending becomes visible in the narratives’ three different stories (the biography of the parent, the autobiography of the author, and the frame narrative of the writing process, which Eakin terms “the story of the story” (Eakin 1999, p. 59)) and in the authors’ dual positioning of themselves as children and professionals.

Westlie and Levin narrate as son and daughter and as Holocaust researchers. Their texts fit the genre of the “research-driven family memoir” (Popkin 2015, p. 137), in which authors combine professional skills in information retrieval and documentation with personal and emotional engagement. The search for information—often conducted after the death of a parent—constitutes a metanarrative linking the parent’s biography with the author’s own life story (Popkin 2015, p. 127). Although such works provide rigorous documentation, their subjective and emotional involvement renders them exemplary cases of relational life writing: they examine both family relationships and the interaction between individual experience and social norms (Eakin 1999; Popkin 2015).

Relational life writing, however, neither provides unmediated access to historical facts nor an “authentic” voice. Rather, it is a social practice that shapes intertwined life narratives. Butler emphasizes the relational and normative dimensions of self-narrating, arguing that “the ‘I’ has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation—or set of relations—to a set of norms” (Butler [2005] 2025, p. 8). Drawing on psychoanalysis and critical theory, she contends that social and linguistic norms, as well as encounters with an other (a “you”), precede identity formation and structure every account of the self. Our lives begin in medias res, and we are inevitably entangled with events, people, and discourses that existed prior to our birth. To give an account of oneself is thus an inherently unfinished activity. Because the conditions shaping the self can never be fully grasped, no narrative can be complete. Yet, for Butler, the attempt to narrate constitutes an ethical act because it is always addressed to someone: “Every account takes place within a scene of address” which is “the rhetorical condition for responsibility” (Butler [2005] 2025, p. 50). In giving the account, the “I” addresses an other, and, simultaneously, it is addressed by another—it is “interpellated,” “called upon”, and made accountable to others. In the act of self-narrating, the “I” thus relates to others and assumes relational responsibility. Due to the dual author position, both Levin’s and Westlie’s memoirs have a double scene of address: the authors are, on the one hand, addressed as son and daughter, and the memoirs are responses to their parents’ calls. On the other hand, the authors are also addressed as Holocaust researchers. The different scenes of address, we will argue, relate to different sets of norms.

Following from this, Butler emphasizes that self-accounting is often an ambivalent act. Interpellations occur in the wake of violations or accusations, when the subject is called upon to explain or justify her own actions. Whether the account will be recognized as valid and truthful depends on the normative and discursive frameworks surrounding the accounts, the available “frameworks of recognition” (Butler [2005] 2025, p. 22), which delineate between what is outside and what is inside the discursive truth regimes. The form or, in this case, genre of the account is crucial “to establish that the self either was or was not the cause of that suffering”, Butler argues, claiming that the “I” needs to “supply a persuasive medium through which to understand the causal agency of the self” (Butler [2005] 2025, p. 12). In this way, Butler emphasizes that a framework of recognition not only entails social and ethical discursive regimes but is also a question of aesthetic form.

As the following analysis will demonstrate, both Fars krig and Vi snakket ikke om Holocaust stage such scenes of address. In their (auto-)biographical accounts, the authors read their parents’ writings as responses to accusations or feelings of injustice: Petter Westlie grapples with shame over his participation in the persecution of Jews and seeks to explain himself to his son, while Fanny Levin struggles with guilt over her inability to save her father. Her fragmented notes are attempts to testify that she did try to act. However, as second-generation witnesses, the authors not only transmit their parents’ experiences but also negotiate their own senses of responsibility toward inherited suffering and historical injustice in relation to the Holocaust. The scene of address is thus doubly inflected: these texts operate simultaneously as biography and autobiography, offering both the parents’ and descendants’ accounts. The acts of accounting are mediated through different genres—which contribute to their specific “frameworks of recognition”—within contemporary Holocaust memory discourse: confession (Westlie) and testimony (Levin). Butler’s concepts thus invite us to examine the rhetorical situation or communicative contract in a narrative as an ethical relation between sender and receiver and consider how narrative form and genre not only constrain what can be said but also create the conditions for breaking silence and enabling social recognition. In the following comparative analysis, these concepts will guide our close reading of Fars krig and Vi snakket ikke om Holocaust, illuminating how they mediate between personal, familial, and collective memory and negotiate ethical responsibility across generations.

3. Scenes of Address and Frameworks of Recognition in Fars krig and Vi snakket ikke om Holocaust

Both Westlie and Levin are personal narrators, “I’s,” constructing their identities in relation to the Holocaust and their parents. Through this relational positioning, the author-narrators clearly establish themselves within the traditions of second-generation literature, postmemory literature, and, in Norwegian, “etterkommerlitteratur” (McGlothlin 2006; Hirsch 2008, 2012; Langås 2024; Torjusen 2021). They ground their narration in affective relation to memories the writers have not lived through but have been socialized into as recipients of their parents’ stories, images, and behaviors (Hirsch 2012, p. 5). More specifically, both author-narrators describe a family memory dominated by silence.

The memoirs’ frame narratives, their stories of how they came into being, are stories of negotiating and breaking with the silence. The author-narrators reveal that their writing processes originate from almost identical scenes of address; they are called upon by their aging parents’ handwritten notes, which they find while cleaning out their old homes. This is the opening of Vi snakket ikke om Holocaust:

When my mother, at the age of ninety-six, moved into the Jewish Senior Centre and Home for the Elderly in the neighbourhood of St. Hanshaugen in Oslo, I came across a number of handwritten documents […]. I am her only child and discovered these papers in the drawers and on the shelves as I was cleaning out the flat. […]. It was not immediately evident to whom the notes were addressed. It was as if she had been writing to herself—like a type of therapeutic exercise. But here and there I could also hear her voice: “Irene—you must remember this!”

(Levin 2024, pp. xv–xvi, italics in original).3

This scene takes place when the daughter—in the role of next of kin and caregiver—goes through her aging mother’s apartment and discovers written traces of wartime memories. The prologue describes the notes’ triple role in the daughter’s (auto)biographical narrative of (her relationship with) her mother—as historical source material, a plot device (the hitherto-unknown traces of the past potentially transform the daughter’s view of a silenced family history), and a rhetorical figure, an apostrophe, a direct request from the mother to the daughter to remind her of her duty to remember. The mother’s imperative both confirms and challenges an implicit agreement to remain silent about the Holocaust, a norm governing the memory practices of Irene Levin’s family. The memoir is at once an affirmative response to her mother’s plea to remember and a transgressive refusal to uphold the pact of silence. The author-narrator is conscious that narrating is an ethical act at great risk. As stated in the last paragraph of the postscript, “I could never have written this book while my mother was alive. That would have been a violation of a kind of contract between us.” (Levin 2024, p. 155).4

As the English title reveals, Levin describes the silence of her family as an everyday silence: not a silence repressing or concealing secrets but rather expressing a non-verbal community and an unspoken story. It is depicted as a community among the parent generation to which the narrator, as a child, had no direct access yet intuitively knew as a discourse she was born into:

The fact that the life of our tiny nuclear family was defined by specific, historical events, was something I simply knew. Just as one learns one’s mother tongue intuitively, I learned about ‘the war.’ […]. The story that was in the air and was never explicitly told, was about how Mother and Father had been fortunate to survive. This also applied to me because I was born after their escape.

(Levin 2024, p. 151).5

Although Levin, as a daughter, feels unable to take part in the parent generation’s conversation about past trauma, she “accepted it as given—as associated with the fate of the Jewish people. It wasn’t until adulthood that I started asking questions about everything that had not been said” (Levin 2024, pp. 151–52).6 The silence, remembered in retrospect by the middle-aged author-narrator, thus becomes an ambivalent sign: on the one hand, it is a sign of exclusion from her older relatives’ shared trauma; on the other, it is a sign of belonging and affective familial connection. The above citation provides an account of the heavy weight of this silence, associated with feelings of shame and “survivor-guilt” that somehow overshadowed the injustice committed against her relatives. As a child, she silently accepts and takes on a certain responsibility for the past traumas, and even as a middle-aged daughter, the author feels obliged to uphold the “pact of silence” governing the family conversation.7

Discovering her mother’s writings at a temporal distance from their everyday family life, within the maternal home but at a time when her mother is no longer present, seems to be a liberating discovery for the daughter. The notes’ fragmented style, ambiguous address, and reflective questioning of the “catastrophe” paradoxically bring her mother closer than she had been in their oral conversations, wherein “she was obliged to face my reactions; when she was writing, she faced only herself” (Levin 2024, p. xvii).8 The written notes open another scene of address in the narrative, where the author-narrator both hears and sees her mother differently; she becomes another “you” to her. She comes to interpret her mother’s account as that of “a woman of action, in contrast to the prevailing narrative about Jews as passive victims” (Levin 2024 p. xvi)9 and as representative of a collective Holocaust survivor experience. The notes thus refract the author-narrator’s relationship to her mother’s biography, and this refraction serves as a catalyst for Levin’s own self-account: “It was when I started reading these notes not solely as the statements of an individual, but as messages about the actions of a community, that I decided to write this book” (Levin 2024, p. xvi).10

Westlie’s prologue describes the memoir’s scene of address in a very similar manner: he finds his father’s writings, and the finding becomes a catalyst for breaking the silence between them. His narrative, however, begins in the silence, which is of quite a different kind than the one Levin describes:

I was never close to my father when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. I didn’t dare to get closer to him because I was afraid of touching on the ‘unmentionable’. Something was hidden inside him, and I didn’t want to know about it. As a young teenager, I was already aware that we couldn’t discuss the war or Nazism. It was best to leave things unsaid.

(Westlie 2023, p. 3).11

While the silence united Levin’s family members in a sense of belonging, it instead represents a taboo, “the unmentionable”, in Westlie’s home. The taboo is particularly related to questions of guilt and responsibility: “I tried to forget my father”, the author-narrator of Fars krig claims: “Perhaps that was the easiest thing to do. It relieved me of responsibility” (Westlie 2023, p. 4).12 Trying to forget him, he has avoided uncomfortable truths, but the rejection eventually shaped his own life.

Unlike Levin, who explicitly addresses the topic of growing up as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Westlie writes little about what it was like to grow up as a so-called “NS-child” and the sense of social exclusion and stigma such a status likely entailed. But he does give an account of how his father’s actions during the war became part of his self-identity. The author-narrator describes living in the shadows of “a trauma that had eclipsed our entire family” (Westlie 2023, p. 8).13 Whereas Levin narratively constructs her relational identity in an affectionate connection with her mother, Westlie shapes it in critical opposition to his father. The silence is not prompted by his father or the parent generation but rather by the son’s refusal to engage with his father’s story. The frame narrative reveals the father’s many attempts to talk to his son about the war and reach a kind of reconciliation: since the 1990s, the author-narrator has been receiving letters and cassette tapes from his father, “letters to me in his voice” (Westlie 2023, p. 5), which he finds too hard to listen to, and he retrospectively admits his lack of response: “I remained unable to accept my father’s request for contact” (Westlie 2023, p. 4).14

The situation that changes Westlie’s approach and makes him receptive of his father’s addressing, is very similar to the scene of address in Levin’s “story of the story”. When the author-narrator has adopted the role of caregiver for his father, who has moved to a nursing home, he discovers a copy of the Danish history book Under Hagekors og Dannebrog (Under the Swastika and the Danish Flag, Christensen et al. [1998] 2004) among his father’s affairs. The copy is filled with handwritten annotations and personal messages from Petter to his son. The author-narrator then realizes the urgency of understanding his father’s story:

This was the book that was supposed to make me understand him better. He had been expecting that the silence between us would be broken, that I would one day ask the difficult question: ‘Why, Dad? Why did you do it? How could you end up like that?’ […] he [my father] clearly wished that at some point I would take him to task for the catastrophe he had been part of. After all, to do so would mean that I still cared about him and acknowledged my attachment to him.

(Westlie 2023, p. 6).15

Crucially, the author-narrator interprets Petter’s address to him not as a plea for sympathy but rather as a desire to be held accountable. For the father, being taken “to task for the catastrophe” by his son becomes a sign of attachment, a gesture of care that he longs for. The discovery of the handwritings and the apostrophe from father to son open the way for the author-narrator to return to the cassette tapes and finally engage with his father’s narrative. Over time, this process leads to actual conversations between father and son, and these dialogues, together with the tapes, make the narrative in Fars krig possible.

Levin’s and Westlie’s intergenerational positioning manifests through silence and writing as reciprocal acts of address. The memoirs transform inherited silence into narrative response: the children’s act of writing arises from the parents’ externally mediated voice. In both memoirs, the father/mother addresses the son/daughter in letters, handwritten fragments and annotations, or cassette recordings functioning as a call that both invites and obliges the descendants to speak. The memoirs also transform the parents’ call for speech into a written narrative account. From a subsequent position, the author-narrators reflect on the parent’s handwritten notes as a site of engagement and interpretation. Both the narration and focalization are temporally distanced from childhood and occur at a stage when the middle-aged authors have assumed a caregiving position with respect to their aging parents. It is against this “coming of age” background and the backdrop of their professional engagement with Holocaust memory that both authors confront how events that occurred before their birth continue to shape their adult lives. In both memoirs’ frame narratives, the process of writing is depicted as a reflective and relational act, through which the author-narrators become recipients and caretakers of their parents’ voices. In giving accounts engaging with these voices, they assume a caring responsibility for their parents as well as for their own life stories.

To fully understand the memoirs’ scenes of address, we need to consider the dual authorial positioning. The authors are not only addressed by their parents but also called upon as Holocaust researchers. Both authors’ extensive knowledge of the Norwegian Holocaust is evident in paratexts such as bibliographies, endnotes, and appendixes. Levin emphasizes that her book is based on fragments derived from her mother’s written and oral transmissions but that “[i]n order to tell my mother’s story, I had to delve into [national] archives where there were documents about my mother and her immediate family and relatives” (Levin 2024, p. 160).16 Similarly, Westlie draws on archival research and historical works to reconstruct his father’s wartime actions.

From their positions as an academic scholar and a journalist, both Irene Levin and Bjørn Westlie, respectively, were agents in shaping a more publicly visible Holocaust memory in Norway. The inclusion of Holocaust memory in the national public discourse, as well as Levin and Westlie’s active participation in it, constitutes an important historical context for Fars krig and Vi snakket ikke om Holocaust. This context also becomes evident in the works’ scenes of address: in the paratexts—specifically in the acknowledgments at the ends of their books—both authors acknowledge the role of prominent Norwegian Historians in prompting their engagement with their parents’ wartime histories.17 The Historians ask the authors to address their parents’ experiences and their family memory not only as stories of individuals but as representatives of collective experiences on a national level.

Levin articulates how temporal and critical distance, and thus her role as a Holocaust researcher, shape her understanding of silent memory and her act of accounting for it: “The implicit and unverbalised knowledge that I learned to interpret as a child, I now began to question as an adult scholar” (Levin 2024, p. xvi).18 As a scholar, she interprets her mother’s silence as shaped by broader cultural norms that were part of the frameworks of recognition in Norwegian society and that structured the Jewish community:

In the period immediately following the end of the war, the Jews in Norway were little inclined to express their opinions in public. […]. Assuming the voice of a victim was not an option—that would undermine Jewish dignity and strength. To issue accusations would also be wrong—their connection to Norway was too uncertain and an incriminating tone could undermine realisation of their profound wish for full acceptance in Norwegian society. A voice that was angry could also be easily misconstrued.

(Levin 2024, p. 111).19

In this way, Levin thematizes how the postwar period was characterized by a unified national narrative that primarily celebrated Norwegian heroism in the resistance against the German occupiers—leaving little room for the Holocaust or Jewish experiences. As a Jew, pointing out the atrocities committed by Norwegians against the Jewish minority would have meant transgressing the normative boundaries of the national narrative and, consequently, positioning oneself outside the collective community.

As the example indicates, the interplay between private and national memory is crucial in both memoirs. The authors’ (auto)biographies reveal how the inclusion of Holocaust memory in the national discourse in the 1990s and onward became a game changer at the level of the family and in regard to their parents’ stories (see also Brovold 2024, p. 82). It is in light of public recognition that Petter Westlie and Fanny Levin start to articulate their experiences and that the authors, some years later, perceive and present their parents’ stories as representative of two marginalized social groups in Norway—the front fighters and the Holocaust survivors.

However, Levin and Westlie are compelled to account not only for wartime actions or inactions but also for their ethical consequences. They must account for their parents’, as well as their own, “causal agency of the self”, that is, their “causal relationship to the suffering of others” (Butler [2005] 2025, p. 12). Their respective accounts unfold within distinct frameworks of recognition, which provide, as we shall see, different norms, both ethically and aesthetically, for a survivor descendant than for the child of a perpetrator. As will be shown, Westlie’s narrative adopts the form of confession, whereas Levin’s narrative assumes the form of testimony—speaking on behalf of the Jewish survivors and their descendants, seeking to articulate and vindicate their experiences in response to an unjust accusation.

Vi snakket ikke om Holocaust criticizes how the collective memory and historical writings in the decades after the war either ignored the experiences of Jews or placed the blame for the Holocaust on the Jewish survivors. Levin cites, for instance, the historians Greve and Nøkleby and their 1980s multi-volume history books, which emphasized that “Jews who were arrested to be deported, neither objected nor resisted”, and paid much less attention to the role of the police in the arrests or “the question of whether Norwegian society as a whole could have done more” (Levin 2024, p. 133, italics in the original).20 Levin largely seeks to explain the consequences such representations had for the Jewish survivors and their descendants. She interprets her mother’s self-reproach for not having been able to save her own father during the war as a direct consequence of historiography and society’s portrayal of Jewish complicity in the Holocaust:

At first glance, it might appear as if my mother viewed her role in these events along the same lines as Greve and Nøkleby did […]. That society placed the responsibility for saving the lives of the Jews on the Jews themselves, and Mother placed the responsibility for saving her father on herself. The difference is that when Mother as a daughter and a Jewish woman takes the burden of responsibility onto her own shoulders, she assumes a responsibility. When Greve and Nøkleby as representatives for society at large hold the Jews responsible, it is the opposite, a deflection of responsibility.

(Levin 2024, pp. 133–34, italics in original).21

The imposition of guilt and shame by broader society made it difficult for Fanny Levin to speak about the traumas she had endured: “Silence was my mother’s response to the situation she found herself in when the war came to an end. This was how she coped with her self-reproach” (Levin 2024, p. 154).22 This silence left the traumas unprocessed, thereby shaping the upbringing of the next generation—most notably influencing Irene Levin’s own sense of self as a member of the Jewish minority in Norway.

In Butler’s terms, Levin’s account constitutes an ethical response to an unjust accusation: she seeks to make her mother’s and the Jewish survivors’ voices heard within a discourse that long excluded them from the stage of recognition. Adopting the genre of testimony as it has developed within post-Holocaust memory culture, this account insists on making these voices heard. We argue that testimony thus becomes an important framework of recognition in the memoir. Traditionally, testimony originates in the courtroom, where the witness appears as a guarantor of truth and justice. In a juridical context, bearing witness entails speaking on behalf of another, providing evidence that can help address or remedy a violation committed against them. The juridical logic extends to the cultural and historical uses of testimony, yet in these contexts, the narrative also takes on a normative dimension, functioning as an ethical and political response to injustice. As Smith and Watson emphasize, bearing witness often entails a confrontation with master narratives that have contributed to the marginalization of a group and an attempt to establish a form of justice for the victims (Smith and Watson 2017, p. 286).

Levin’s testimony is both a response to the postwar accusations directed at Jewish survivors and an attempt to redirect responsibility, “the causal relation to the suffering” (Butler [2005] 2025, p. 12), for the Holocaust and its aftermath toward Norwegian society. The memoir’s biography on Fanny Levin’s war years is where the testimony most clearly has a double sender: the author-narrator’s account is explicitly based on her mother’s notes, that is, Fanny Levin’s testimony of what she and other Norwegian Jewish women actually did. It is, however, noteworthy that the author-narrator, with a few exceptions, does not quote directly from her mother’s notes or statements but instead employs a method through which she has “sought to weave these written and oral accounts into a tapestry” (Levin 2024, p. 160).23 One possible reading of this method is that Irene Levin does not wish to expose her mother’s private and personal notes, which were never intended for the public. This interpretation is supported by her concluding remark: “What would mother have said if she knew that I wrote a book about her [and rendered her notes]?” (Levin 2024, p. 155).24 However, a possible risk of the author-narrator’s paraphrasing is undermining her mother’s voice—something that, in turn, could be seen as diverging from the testimonial genre’s normative obligation to hear previously unheard voices.

Another effect of this narrative strategy is that it foregrounds the survivors’ active measures during the war and thus makes Fanny Levin’s experiences representative. In statements like “The Jewish women, like my mother, did everything they could to find hiding places for their spouses, sons, and fathers” (Levin 2024, p. 32)25, it is clearly the voice of the author, Irene Levin, accounting from her position as a second-generation witness, speaking on behalf not only of her mother but also of the Norwegian female Holocaust survivors as well as their descendants. The (auto)biographical story of the postwar family life shows how society’s handling—its failure to address the past and the implicit accusation directed at the survivors—imposed a new form of guilt and shame upon these people. The Norwegian Jews found that their war experiences were excluded from the national narrative, marginalized, and met with reproach. As a result, they were silenced in regard to the suffering they had endured, leaving their traumas unprocessed and marked by guilt.

Levin’s narrative also bears witness to how this collective silence shaped family memory and intergenerational relationships. It critically explores the family’s belonging at the crossroads of Jewish and Norwegian traditions, focalizing how as a child, Irene Levin downplayed her Jewish identity in relation to ethnic Norwegians to try to fit in (Levin 2024, pp. 120–21). In this way, the book can be read as the author-narrator’s testimony to what it was like to grow up as a Jewish descendant in a memory culture that did not recognize Jewish experiences as part of the national community. At the same time, the depiction of Norwegian Jewish everyday family life functions as a performative act that makes visible and publicly acknowledges minority experiences, which previously could not be included in the “community of ‘us’” (Levin 2024, p. 121).26 As a daughter bearing witness to her mother generation’s experiences and the legacy of silence, Levin inscribes her family memoir into the tradition of testimony by challenging the dominant postwar narrative’s implicit accusation laid against the Holocaust survivors. She assumes an ethical responsibility both toward the Holocaust and its memory. In Butler’s sense, this can be understood as a performative act of accounting that seeks to expand the very parameters of who may emerge as a recognizable subject within the collective narrative (Butler [2005] 2025, p. 22). Where silence once functioned as a protective mechanism against shame and the imposition of responsibility, Levin’s narrative becomes a language of restoration and recognition.

Unlike Levin’s testimony concerning the injustices committed against her mother and relatives during and after the war, Fars krig, by contrast, adopts the genre of confession, in which he confronts his father’s actions and holds him accountable as a perpetrator. While testimony is intended to give voice to an experience that has been invisible or suppressed, confession is concerned with bringing forward guilt and seeking reconciliation for the culpable party. In Butler’s terminology, this represents a different framework of recognition, which might be viewed as a consequence of the two works’ different scenes of address—the fact that Levin paraphrases, while Westlie includes dialogue. Theologically, confession is characterized by an asymmetrical relationship: the one confessing addresses an authority (God/a priest), acknowledges guilt, and seeks restoration. It is not primarily concerned with legal truth but rather moral purification and personal responsibility. In the liturgy, confession begins with the words, “Father, I have sinned,” through which the penitent acknowledges guilt before a paternal and spiritual authority who mediates divine forgiveness. The confessional dynamic in Fars krig inverts the traditional hierarchy of the Catholic rite: it is the father who acknowledges his guilt to his son within these normative frameworks, a premise, as described above, that is part of the scene of address—the father’s annotations in the Danish history book, which the author-narrator interprets as a wish to be taken “to task for the catastrophe” he had participated in (Westlie 2023, p. 6). The son assumes the role of witness, interpreter, and, implicitly, priest and moral judge.

Westlie’s narrative, in a manner similar to Levin’s, can be read as a critique of society’s lack of attention to Jewish experiences and the complicity of Norwegians during the Holocaust. The accusation includes a critique of the Norwegian postwar treason trials, which did not properly investigate his father’s crimes (Westlie 2023, p. 114). Confronting and “investigating” the past atrocities, the author-narrator seeks to reckon with guilt and the moral inheritance of complicity. A recurring focus of the author-narrator, “the most painful and hardest issue to talk about”, is the question of whether his father played an active role in the persecution of Jews: “We have touched on this topic many times before; I have even read aloud to him what Norwegian war reporters wrote about how the Ukrainian Jews were treated. In various forms, I have asked him the question: ‘Where you directly involved in shooting Jews?’” (Westlie 2023, p. 162).27

In Fars krig, the relationship between the one confessing (the father) and the recipient of the confession (the son and author) is atypical and asymmetrical. In the biography of his father’s wartime actions (part I), Westlie writes as a Historian, applying a distanced perspective and consistently referring to his father as “Petter”. This part mainly relies on public archive sources and situates Petter’s actions within the historiography of Norwegian front-line soldiers. In the (auto)biographical story (parts II and III) of the postwar period, Petter Westlie is referred to as the author-narrator’s father (Westlie 2023, p. 168). This story includes dialogues between father and son, in which the father himself is given a voice. The father’s confessional responses, represented in the narrative in direct discourse, become the subject of his son’s critical examinations against other historical sources. The asymmetry persists but is reconfigured, transforming the theological model of confession into an intergenerational act of moral reckoning rather than spiritual absolution.

The last part of Westlie’s narrative, the chapter entitled “The Good, Difficult Discussion”, presents a turning point with the potential for reconciliation between father and son. This happens when the father admits remorse: “I have been troubled by a guilty conscience, both when the war was going on and afterward. It really hurt me to think that I have not always been honorable” (Westlie 2023, p. 160).28 This turning point situates Westlie’s family memory within a broader cultural and historical framework for the normative significance of confession in the collective memory of the Holocaust. According to C.K. Martin Chung, confession has been central in postwar collective reckoning. He notes the irony that “postwar Germans have relied on the Jewish device of repentance as a feasible way out of their unparalleled ‘national catastrophe’” (Chung 2017, p. 250). Aleida Assmann elaborates with the concept of Schuldkultur: “The entire concept of reconciliation (Versöhnung) through repentance (Buße) is only thinkable on the ground of a guilt culture” (Assmann and Frevert 1999, p. 91). Such a culture implies that remorse is not merely a personal feeling but involves acknowledgment, confession, and an attempt to repair what has been damaged. Although the questions of guilt and perpetration bear other connotations in the Norwegian WWII memory culture, the German context might illuminate the cultural significations of the memoir’s aging Nazi perpetrator’s confession as a necessary stage of reestablishing social bonds at a familial and national level.

Westlie’s account not only addresses his father’s crimes but also the issue of inherited and transgenerational guilt. When viewed as the author-narrator’s confession, the memoir might be seen as an effort to recognize his father in himself. The author-narrator scrutinizes his own choices and relates his engagement in the Communist Party in the 1970s with his father joining the Norwegian Nazi Party in the 1930s—“perhaps such extremist political parties attract a personality type that we both represent” (Westlie 2023, p. 157).29 As shown above, he also critically confronts his previous hesitation to take on responsibility towards his father: “It was not until 2004 that I was truly prepared to tackle my father’s past. Two years earlier, I had written a book about World War II and the atrocities committed against the Norwegian Jews, although I had deliberately avoided researching what my own father had done” (Westlie 2023, p. 8).30 The statements express an underlying fear, permeating the narrative, of what Chung calls “unrecognized identification”, the risk of reproducing parental experiences and patterns even in rebellion against them (Chung 2017, p. 256). The critical self-confession engages both personal and historical responsibility—toward his father and toward society—and simultaneously opens a broader discussion of intergenerational responsibility.

Westlie’s narrative as a descendant thus also unfolds within the normative frameworks of Vergangenheitsbewältigung discussed in the 1980s and 1990s, when figures such as Ralph Giordano and Jürgen Habermas questioned German society’s collective guilt and responsibility. Habermas emphasizes that perpetrators’ descendants also carry a collective responsibility: “Our way of life is bound with that of our parents and grandparents through a tightly entangled nexus of familial, local, political, as well as intellectual traditions—that is, through a historical milieu, which has made us what and who we are today” (Habermas 1986). An interview with Bjørn Westlie echoes Habermas’ claim: “We live in the shadow of our parents. We measure our own lives against the choices our parents made back then. It is important that we as the children of active participants in the National Unification Party recognize that we bear an extra responsibility to learn from history” (Westlie 2016, our translation).31 For Westlie, to engage with his parents’ past becomes necessary to become a responsible human being. The memoir’s exploration of generational guilt can thus be read not merely as an effort to document historical injustice but as an ethical generational obligation. The aim is not to reach agreement or acceptance of his father’s actions. Rather, it is to break the silence that has long shaped their relationship to assume responsibility as an “implicated subject” (Rothberg 2019) in the Holocaust. In this way, it becomes clear that Westlie’s project is not only to examine his father’s guilt but also to reflect on how such a legacy may recur in the next generation and how he himself is ethically obligated to investigate the conditions preceding his own birth.

Taken together, the two family memoirs demonstrate how descendants of both victims and perpetrators must navigate ethical, relational, and normative conditions in giving an account of themselves—both within the family and in relation to a national memory culture. Our analysis has revealed how Levin’s and Westlie’s acts of listening, reading, and writing can be read, in Butler’s terms, as ethical responses to being called upon. We have highlighted how the works share several distinctive features, particularly in their use of dual scenes of address. At the same time, the authors are addressed from—and respond to—widely different cultural and aesthetic normative expectations or frameworks of recognition. By examining how the two works engage with the genres of testimony and confession, respectively, our analysis reveals significant differences in their negotiations of guilt and ethical responsibility: Vi snakket ikke om Holocaust seeks to release Jewish survivors from responsibility in the Holocaust, making the second-generation family memoir a kind of liberating discourse where the author-daughter takes on responsibility by accounting on behalf of a silent parent generation. In contrast, in Fars krig, the author initiates a belated moral reckoning and insists on the necessity of taking on responsibility for past choices—both for his father and himself.

4. Conclusions: Rethinking Postgeneration Literature

A comparison between a family memoir authored by the daughter of a Holocaust victim and one by the son of a Nazi perpetrator may appear both provocative and problematic insofar as the two life narratives are commonly associated with distinctly divergent moral and discursive frameworks. In this article, however, this very difference is methodologically productive: the significant differences between Levin’s and Westlie’s structurally very similar narratives constitute an empirical basis for developing new comparative perspectives on second-generation literature.

Any act of giving an account is relational and normatively situated: it is addressed to a “you” and unfolds within specific moral and discursive frameworks. Negotiations over the recognition of one’s own and one’s parents’ histories, however, vary according to historical and social context as well as according to the norms that shape cultural memory at a given time. In this respect, Judith Butler’s concepts of the “scene of address” and “framework of recognition” may extend and supplement psychoanalytical approaches—and notions like transmitted trauma, “postmemory,” or “absent memory”—which have dominated much of the research on second-generation and postgeneration literature over the past few decades (see, for instance, Fine 1988; Hirsch 2008, 2012; Jacobs 2017). Whereas postmemory approaches primarily illuminate affective and representational transmissions across generations, a Butlerian relational life-writing approach enables a more explicit analysis of the ethical and normative frameworks in which postgeneration narratives are embedded, rendering them possible and culturally recognized.

This article presents a comparative close reading of two works situated within the same memory culture and authored by members of the same generation, thereby limiting its empirical scope. Our intention is not to provide a thorough overview of Norwegian second-generation Holocaust literature, nor to argue that the compared memoirs are representative of this genre. Rather, we sought to develop an analytical framework with broader applicability to postgeneration narratives across national memory cultures. The concepts “scene of address” and “frameworks of recognition” have not received much scholarly attention within this field of research. One valuable exception is the Australian gender scholar Anna Szörényi’s autoethnographic analysis of her grandfather’s Nazi past (Szörényi 2010), which is an illustrative example of the fact that these Butlerian concepts are relevant in regard to other national contexts and methodological approaches and might encompass third-generation narratives.

Rather than confining analysis to specific national or generational contexts, our framework invites new perspectives on both second- and third-generation Holocaust family memoirs across diverse national memory landscapes—including texts such as American Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Spiegelman 1997), German Muttermale (Leupold 2025), and Swedish Ihågkom oss till liv (Dranger 2022), to mention but a few. Furthermore, the framework might be fruitful for analyses of postgeneration family memoirs, both fictional and biographical, coping with the familial and national memories of other historical state-inflicted mass violences, with the post-DDR Wende literature (like Die Kinder der Täter (Westernhagen 1991) and Scandinavian Sami family chronicles (like Sameproblemet (Nedrejord 2024) and När vi var samer (Jonsson 2021)) being only two of many examples. The scope of this article does not permit a further inquiry into such potential. Hopefully, however, it might inspire further research on a noteworthy body of texts in contemporary literature across cultures and languages.