Feeling Memory: Remembering Wartime Childhoods in France(The Columbia Oral History Series)

What did it feel like to be a child in France during World War II? Feeling Memory is an affective exploration of children's lives in wartime France and the ways they are remembered.

Lindsey Dodd draws on the recorded oral narratives of a hundred people to examine the variety of experiences children had during the war. She considers different aspects of remembering, underscoring the centrality of emotion to memory. This book covers a wide range of locations-the country and the city, Occupied France and the Free Zone-and situations-well-off and poor children, those separated from their families and those with them; it places Jewish children's experiences alongside non-Jewish children's. Against the backdrop of momentous events, readers encounter children playing, working, eating, thinking, doing, and feeling.

An investigation of the emotions of history, Feeling Memory argues for the transformative potential of affect theory and affective methodologies in oral history and the history of everyday life. This book makes major contributions to the history of France during World War II, understandings of children's lives in war, and the use of memory in historical and oral history analysis.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Chronology
A Note on Transcription and Translation
Introduction
Pause—Anne-Marie and Her Father
Positioning
Part I. Memories Felt
1. Articulated Feeling
Pause—Daniel: Fear on the Road
2. Affects and Intensities
Pause—Nicole: Inside Drancy
Part II. Memories Located
Pause—Nancette: Happy Places, Happy Times
3. The Weirdness of Memory Time
4. Places in Traumatic Memory
5. Spaces in Traumatic Memory
Pause—Hélène: Persecution and Space
Part III. Memories Told
Pause—Filming Marie-Madeleine
6. Regimes of Memory, Regimes of Feeling
7. Communities of Memory, Communities of Feeling
Pause—Édith and Jean Compete
Part IV. Memories Lived
8. Materialities of the Everyday
Pause—Henri Plays at War
9. Affective Others
Pause—Danièle: The Strain of Uncertainty
Pause—Robert: The Contingency of Moral Meaning
10. Contingency and Rupture
Conclusion: A Palette of Haecceities
Appendix: The Interviewees
Notes
Bibliography

About the Author :
Lindsey Dodd is an independent historian and oral historian. Until 2023 she was reader in modern European history at the University of Huddersfield. She is the author of French Children Under the Allied Bombs, 1940–1945: An Oral History (2016) and coeditor of Vichy France and Everyday Life: Confronting the Challenges of Wartime (2018). She is also part of the editorial team for the journal Oral History.

Review :
A sensitive and imaginative exploration of the connections among war, childhood, and memory that demonstrates the meaning of emotions and feelings as historical forces. Feeling Memory deftly weaves together 'memory stories' and the latest scholarship to provide an entirely fresh approach to World War II in France. The result is a richly textured, nuanced study of the emotions of history that offers us new ways to think about children’s experiences and the places and events that shape our memory of the past. Feeling Memory theorizes a history of a present where events matter, memories stick and accrete, time ruptures, experiences generate, and little worlds proliferate around sounds, rhythms, and things. It experiments, listening for the intensities and unknown potential of an affective history from the inside out where the things of the world speak differently to one another. In a compelling mixture of theory, reflections on method, and vivid vignettes, Feeling Memory explores the emotions that animate and bind memory in oral history. Its insights extend well beyond the interview, however: Dodd shows what a history of emotions can achieve once affect is seen not just in terms of social prescriptions but as the glue that binds memory and relationships past and present. Feeling Memory provides a nuanced and sophisticated explication of how the emotional content of memory shapes the remembered past into the present. Dodd contends that all historians—not just oral historians—need to take affective forms of knowledge more seriously and to search for the traces of feelings in their sources and analyses. The memory stories that are at the heart of the book are truly engaging and often moving. They make the book come alive. The book sheds important methodological light on the uses and misuses of oral history. It will be of interest to anyone working with oral sources, not just specialists in childhood at war. Dodd’s critical discussion of the reuse of interviews conducted by other scholars is a strong feature of the book. Highly original and methodologically innovative...It’s a beautiful, important, and exciting book whose empirical findings are difficult to summarize but that convincingly makes the case that historians need to understand and pay much more attention to the affective realm. Feeling Memory is a must-read for scholars interested in memory, affect, and emotions. The book also provides valuable methodological insights for those working with oral interviews, as well as historians of childhood questioning adult interviews’ potential for recovering children’s perspectives....Its short, stand-alone, and example-filled chapters will make wonderful additions to undergraduate course syllabi.