INDEX OF PAPERS FOR ORAL HISTORIANS
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1 |
Oral History and the 'Advanced' In-depth Interview |
Roslyn Burge |
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2 |
Dancing through the memory of our movement: four paradigmatic revolutions in oral history |
Dr. Alistair Thompson |
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3 |
Recorded Memories of my Family from Bohemia to Batemans Bay - |
George Imashev |
Oral History and the ‘Advanced’ In-depth Interview
In May 2002, in response to OHAA members requests, Roslyn Burge and Sue Georgevits, consultant historians, presented a seminar on how to plan and go about the research for an advanced or in-depth interview. They addressed how the demands of the project – and the required research – direct the structure ( topics and questions) of the actual interview.
In her paper Roslyn Burge uses illustrations from projects as well as giving practical advice on the methodology for this researched, in-depth interview. Click here to download.
Dancing through the memory of our movement:
four paradigmatic revolutions in oral history
Dr. Alistair Thomson
University of Sussex , United Kingdom
This paper was presented at the XIVth INTERNATIONAL ORAL HISTORY CONFERENCE, SYDNEY
In introducing his paper Alistair says: In the course of editing a second edition of The Oral History Reader, Rob Perks and myself have had the pleasure and privilege of scouring recent oral history scholarship and reviewing the history and development of our movement. We have identified four paradigmatic revolutions in oral history, which I explore in this paper. The first revolution was the post World War Two renaissance in the use of memory as a source for historical and social research. The second revolution in oral history was, in part, a response to positivist critics who feared the politics of people's history and who targeted the 'unreliability' of memory. By the late 1970s imaginative oral historians turned these criticisms on their head and argued that the so-called unreliability of memory was also its strength, and that the subjectivity of memory provided clues not only about the meanings of historical experience, but also about the relationships between past and present, between memory and identity, and between public and private. Memory became the subject as well as the source of oral history. The third revolution in oral history involved a paradigmatic shift in our approach to the 'objectivity' of the oral historian as interviewer and analyst. By the late 1980s oral historians became increasingly alert to the ways that we were affected by our interviews and how we, in turn, affected the interview relationship, the data it generated and the ways we made sense of it. We are in the middle of the fourth, dizzying digital revolution in oral history, and its outcomes are impossible to predict. New digital technologies are transforming the ways in which we record, preserve, catalogue, interpret, make and share oral histories. The future of oral history, and the role of the oral historian, has never been so exciting, or so uncertain.
Recorded memories of my family from Bohemia to Batemans Bay. Whose story is it?
George Imashev
This thought provoking paper was presented at a seminar held by the New South Wales branch of the Oral History Association of Australian in July 2009 at the State Library of New South Wales. Please take the time to listen to the sound bites as Anna Jochmann tells her own story.
Time Line 1909-2004
| Jochmann/Imashev Events | World Events |
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10 May 1909 Anna Jochmann born Sonneberg, Bohemia, |
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6 December 1912 Nikolai Imashew born |
1914 August WW1 begins 1917 Russian Revolution |
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1928 Anna Jochmann begins her theatre career |
1929 Beginning of the Great Depression |
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1941 Anna Jochmann meets Nikolai Imaschew in Linz, Austria |
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8 September 1945 Anna & Nikolai marry in Linz, |
1945 May 8 Germany surrenders |
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18 November 1950 Anna & Nikolai arrive in Australia with three children under ‘displaced persons' scheme |
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1955 Occupation forces (American, Soviet, British & French) withdraw from Austria |
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2 July 1984 Nikolai Imaschew dies, aged 72 26 December 2004 Anna Jochmann dies, aged 95 |
My mother, Anna Jochmann, was born in 1909 in the village of Sonneberg in the province of Bohemia, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now part of the Czech State. My father, Nikolai Imaschew, was born in 1912 in Irkutsk, Siberia on the shores of Lake Baikal, a part of the Russian Tsarist Empire, now part of the Russian Federation. Both experienced World War 1 and the Spanish Influenza epidemic and in my father’s case, a revolution. Both experienced the Great Depression, invasion by foreign armies, and World War 2 and its immediate aftermath. The end result being that both were penniless, homeless and considered stateless. In 1950 they arrived in Australia as displaced persons under the assisted migrant scheme.
Eastern Europe
In 1988 I took my mother on a trip to visit the area where she had been born and where she had grown up. On this trip from Australia my mother began to tell me in detail about this early period in her life right up until she left for Australia. I stood in the village square where my mother was born. I stood on the site where the house stood in which my mother grew up. I saw the house of one of my great uncles where my mother used to play. I stood at the grave of my grandmother.
Czech Republic
Suddenly places like Sonneberg, Teplice, Tetschen, Meistersdorf, Boehmisch Kamnitz, Boehmisch Leipa, Langenau, Lobositz and Leitmeritz became real and separated off from the fantasy stories, like the Grimm Fairy Tales, that my mother told me as a child.
In 1994 in my mother’s 85th year she consented to being interviewed, but insisted that these interviews remain a secret between us until her death. Sadly, she died in 2004. In preparing these remnants of memory in order to make them available to family and friends I quickly realised that I was not simply relying on the interviews for the retention of my mother and father’s story. Many issues kept coming up that complicated the telling of their story. Three issues were particularly important. They were Memory barriers, Language barriers and what I call Filial complications.
As I believe that these issues were not confined to my particular circumstance I thought I would demonstrate how I dealt with them.
Memory Barriers
The memories of my parents’ story came from four sources. What my father told me while I was growing up. What my mother told me while I was growing up. My interviews with my mother as she told me about her life and about my father’s life, and the additional memories told to me by my mother immediately after the recorder had been turned off.
These four sources, together with selective memory, whether purposeful or unintentional, infiltrate the recorded memory and, linked to filial complications can become a powerful brew. What happens when these memories clash? Do these different layers of memory have equal weight?
I was fortunate that my mother did not suffer from the age diseases of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or the various cancers. These all affect memory but the source is physiological and was irrelevant to my mother. What I discovered was that the collective memory of my parent’s story was more affected by psychology and emotions than physiology. I also discovered that time, place and space were at least three important elements that put psychological and emotional barriers on memory.
I also discovered that to keep a memory alive you need to regularly revisit it. Normally this is easy as place and space remain more or less constant and close and there is only time to deal with. In my mother’s situation all three were very distant and so she did what you would expect, she grouped her memories around those big events in her life which she could more easily revisit in her mind on a regular basis. Those events were World War 1, joining the theatre, World War 2, and meeting my father. This regular revisiting of our memories both collectively and individually is a fundamental part of the process of keeping memory alive. It would appear that as individuals and as a society there is a need to revisit these memories, especially if there is little continuity of place and space, otherwise the memories are replaced. Maybe this is why we have reunions, anniversaries, celebrate Christmas and Easter, and commit ourselves to a multitude of cyclical events both public and private. By regularly revisiting an event we keep it alive in our memory. This may explain why my mother did not revisit very often the memories of becoming a mother four times. Her children came with her to Australia but the wars she experienced and her life in the theatre did not.
Sound recording Tracks 1 & 2: In these examples Anna Jochmann revisits some of her important memories. Here she tells us why she was interested in the theatre and how she became an actress, an event that happened to her 66 years ago.
Track 1
Translation of Track 1
| How did you get the idea of wanting to be on the theatre? "I was five years old and small travelling troupes came around just as I did later on. Europe always supported theatres. In the last war soldiers on leave always asked' where is the theatre?' The fairy stories - Hansel and Gretel. I went with my mother" Was it during the war? "No don't think so, don't know. I was five years old. I thought to myself ‘those two children I would like to play them' ". |
Track 2
Translation of track 2
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"I read that in Lobositz there was a vacancy in the theatre for a young girl, experience not necessary. It was a half hour train ride. Should I try it? I spoke to the chef and his wife. They encouraged me and said' go for it'. ...... I went next Monday. The female director was there. She asked me if I could sing something for her. I said yes but not something from the theatre. She said ‘any song, a folk tune or a song from school would do'. So I sang and she said ‘I will take you but how old are you?' I said not quite nineteen. She said she could only take me on if my mother gave permission as I was under 21 and asked ‘do you know if she would? I said I don't know [laughter] but would ask. I was then told I would be appointed if permission was given. I was later told that as the director had used ‘du' and not ‘Sie' she must have liked me. [laughter] I went home, left my old job and told my mother I had another job. She wanted to know what it was. I did not know what to say so I started to dance around the room and she said ‘Ah, the theatre, I know'. |
I have two older brothers and an older sister. As you would expect they have different personalities and interests. They have also absorbed stories that our parents told us, sometimes collectively, sometimes individually. While the essence of the memory remains the same due to the consistency of place and space, details can vary as time goes on. An example is the story about what happened to my father when Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia.
He had been an officer, training to be an engineer in the Czech Army and had the choice of either joining the German Army or the forced labour gangs. He chose the latter. All of us children knew this story and it had remained consistent. However, recently my brother told me that the first job my father performed in the forced labour gang was at a cement factory where the dust was so bad he had lost his appetite and that is why he took up smoking. I have no recollection of this aspect of my father's story, but do remember that he was forced to work on the railways, either as a labourer or as a draftsman in the office depending on how fanatical the person in charge was. Under such stress he took up smoking.
What is important here is that the essence of the story remains true, accurate and correct. My father's career was destroyed by invasion, and personal and financial security was gone. One side effect was becoming addicted to smoking. This story is an accurate illustration of the human situation in occupied Czechoslovakia. In this context the question of whether it was at a cement factory or at the railway is not that important - it most probably was both. The important memory that lasts, however, is the incredible uncertainty and stress faced by my father and thousands of others. Having witnessed and experienced the invasion of their country, they then faced eventual death because they were not considered to belong to a superior race.
Language Barriers
The memories are carried across many languages as places and spaces change. My father's childhood language was Russian to which were added Czech, German and English. My mother's childhood language was Bohemian German, but she spent more than half her life in Australia, an English-speaking country. I interviewed my mother in Bohemian German, which was the language spoken at home in Australia but I am translating her memories into English. While growing up I did not speak Russian because my father could speak German but my mother could not speak Russian. My mother, for a variety of reasons, never really learnt to speak English although she could understand it reasonably well when it was spoken and she could also read it reasonably well. After my father died the only time I spoke German in Australia was when I spoke to my mother. With this limited German, I tried, in the interviews with my mother, to explore aspects of her early life. This would have been a challenge in English but with my limited German it was very hard!
Sound recording tracks 3 & 4: Anna Jochmann also experienced language barriers. With the establishment of Czechoslovakia, Czech became the ‘official' language.
Track 3
Translation of Track 3
| "The new name, I was already at school. Czechoslovakia it is, no more the Austrian Monarchy. Along comes the postman one day and says ‘Mrs. Jochmann we will now have to learn Czech'. She [Anna's mum] says ‘I might not be able to learn it'. ‘Na, you won't have to, everything will be in two languages'. And it was so. ‘And if there is something that is important that needs to be written all officials are trained to do it for you. What can you do, there you have it, Czechoslovakia!'" |
Track 4
Translation of Track 4
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"Once there were two Czech officials eating. They advised me ‘I should learn the language; it is the State's language'. Yes I said, I was interested but then I got distracted and then when everything was in two languages I thought why! I had a Czech boyfriend, Hubert. He knew a little German. His father was a ‘Fastmeister' and he said when I spoke some Czech with Hubert ‘do not speak Czech with Hubert, the fellow should learn German!' " [laughter] |
You will have noticed two things from these examples. The way Anna Jochmann talks about her experiences - very theatrical and she plays the role of each of the people she encounters whether it is her mother, a colleague or a stranger! Also, in her 85th year she introduces English words into her memories.
One could conclude that we may as well give up with oral history because at each stage of the language change, where space and place alters, there is selectivity and hence loss. But I take the opposite view. I believe that truth can sometimes be lost amongst the detail of dates and trivialities. Despite the inevitable loss of some of these details, mythology and tradition continues to emerge and they have an amazing consistency. All the displaced people and their children since Adam and Eve were evicted from the Garden of Eden, to use a Judeao-Christian symbol and I am sure there are others, can relate to and understand how my parents felt when they lost their livelihood, their security, their homeland and their tribe. Most people today, despite their cultural and language differences would understand how difficult it is to retain individual identity under such great losses and how easy it would be to sink into despair and madness. That Anna and Niklolai, like so many others, retained their identity and sanity is remarkable.
Their story is now an Australian story. My sister who has spent most of her life in the USA, where she raised a family, would add that our parent's story is now also an American Story!
Filial complications
While interviewing my mother I realised that the interviewer's role was not static but dynamic as the emotional pendulum swung according to the memory content being revealed. My interest in aspects of my mother's early life did not always coincide with what she wanted to tell me. Is it appropriate for a son to ask his mother how she survived, as a young woman, when three different armies invaded her homeland? Well, I tried!
Sound recording track 5: Trying to get the train ride experience on tape
Track 5
Translation of track 5
| You were travelling in Czechoslovakia, on a train, along came some Russian soldiers with an officer. One wanted to flirt with you. Do you remember? You told me this. And the other, the officer simply slept. And the other one slowly became cheekier and so on. You told me that once. Don't you remember anymore? "No, this, no, that other time?" No, you told me they came from the Eastern Front, Russian, no, not Russian, German soldiers, you told me. They were returning from the Eastern Front. You told me. They were not Russian, they were German soldiers with an officer and one of them wanted to flirt with you and a bit more and then he sat next to you and you told me you said to him "I know what is on your mind but I am Aryan" and you showed him your Ahnenpass. That is when the officer woke. You told me. "Do you mean the colleague in Neice, the Swiss?" No, no, no, oh well, it does not matter. "lots of different things can happen". Yeh! |
This example illustrates how the elements of time, place and space working through childhood memory, language and filial complications can put emotional and psychological barriers on recorded memory. Here I demonstrate my inexperience at interviewing, my limited German, my lack of facts by confusing Russian soldiers with German soldiers, and my emotional state. What I was trying to get on tape was an episode in my mother's life she had told me in previous conversations. This episode was the single most powerful reason for why I decided to interview her, and yet I was unable to ‘get it on tape'.
This train ride from Teplice, Czechoslovakia to Linz, Austria normally takes four hours. It took my mother two weeks via Bavaria, Germany. I have 50 minutes of interview detailing other experiences on that trip where she risked being robbed, raped and murdered by Russians, Czechs, Germans and Americans.
For the record, this is what it was.
At some stage during the last year of World War 2 my mother was on a train travelling from Czechoslovakia to Linz in Austria where she was living. She was alone in the compartment when a group of German soldiers with one officer entered. They were exhausted and apparently were returning home having been on the eastern front. The war was over for them. All of them, including the officer, were more interested in catching up on sleep than talking to a young pretty woman in her mid 30s - except for one soldier. His conversation took the following path. First he asked why such a young woman was travelling by herself. Then he commented on how fortunate she was being with German soldiers who were there to protect her from Czechs, Russians, Jews and all the other riff-raff let loose during the war. When he moved next to my mother and put his arm around her as part of his protection she realised, as she put it, the worst was about to happen. Her first attempt to deflect the soldier's advances was to concentrate on the officer by asking questions. How long had he been at the front? What were his plans for the future, etc? When she only received a semi-audible grunt my mother realised she was now in a perilous situation. As my mother told me, she saw the madness in what was about to happen. Here was one of Hitler's soldiers who had been sent to the war to protect and unify all German minorities in Europe and he was now about to rape and possibly kill one of those Germans. In that madness she saw a desperate opportunity for survival. Nazi Germany had established various rules for regulating the workplace which favoured the mythical Aryan race. Consequently Jews, Slavs and Gypsies could never ever reach senior positions in government employment. For those employed in cultural activities it was zero tolerance for non-Aryans. My mother, who was an actress in the State Theatre, had met this requirement and was able to pass this non-sensical regulation because she had no Jewish persons in her family history. Nevertheless, it was a requirement for her to carry proof of her purity in the form of an Ahnenpass (a book of her pedigree) and produce it on demand.
Another madness occurring at the time was that retreating German officers who failed, for example, to blow up an historical bridge could be executed by the Gestapo. My mother had also been reminded on many occasions that she would be a brood mare on one of the Aryan farms set up to repopulate the east once the war was won by Germany. In a desperate move, my mother combined all these madnesses and hoped it would get her out of her predicament. She turned to the soldier who was molesting her and said, she hoped his pedigree was better than hers because when the Gestapo found out he had mistreated someone as Aryan as she was, he would be shot. The soldier, as my mother relates, did remove his arm from around her waist but continued to sit next to her and argue that he felt he deserved some reward for risking his life at the front. When one of the other soldiers chipped in by saying, all this Gestapo threat was nonsense, my mother thought the worst would happen. Then the officer awoke and said that he had not survived the entire war in order to be shot by the Gestapo because one of his soldiers did something stupid. While he was in command no one would touch this woman and if they tried he would shoot them. He told his soldiers to go back to sleep and think about the future and then turned to my mother and suggested she get off at the next station. And this she did at 1:00am at a station in the middle of nowhere. As my mother ironically commented, I used the very madness that had created the dangerous situation to save my life.
The attempt to record my parents' story has influenced me psychologically and emotionally. Having been born in Australia, an English-speaking country, I needed to transcend time, place and space, languages, cultures, changing political and economical landscapes, and two world wars and their after effects, in order to make sense of my parents' story. As a consequence my outlook is always wider than the immediate circumstance. My parents' story is part of the prism through which I look at the world. It is part of the arsenal of life that I use to give meaning to identity and the issues involved in belonging to a tribe, the discussions surrounding definitions of nationality and statehood, ethnicity, loyalty and cultural inheritance.
We all know about the stories that come out after the tape has stopped. There was one I had with my mother that is relevant here. My mother believed that tribalism was one of the most powerful forces that motivated people because it provided the basis for their individual identity and collective protection. While the political boundaries of state and nationhood may change, the tribe by remaining intact, provided identity and security. Putting it crudely, she always maintained that she was Bohemian German even though at different times in her life she became a national or citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czechoslovakia and the Third Reich, stateless and then a citizen of Australia. She also maintained that my father was Russian even though he became a national of Czechoslovakia, a non person of the Third Reich, stateless and then a citizen of Australia. From this logic she maintained her children were half Bohemian German and half Russian. This may hold for those born in Europe. However, I pointed out to my mother that I was born in Australia and I cannot be one half Bohemian German, one half Russian and one half Australian or one third Bohemian German, one third Russian and one third Australian for that matter. Her reply was swift.
| ‘I know where you were born and do not give me a maths lesson! I know it does not add up and the logic cannot hold. But that is the trouble with the world today. A powerful if imperfect way of living has been destroyed and there is nothing better to replace it with. All I am saying is that tribalism is a lot more powerful and resilient than it sometimes appears, and to think otherwise is to make a big mistake'. |
In that one statement my mother revealed the inherent strength and weakness of tribalism!
So in conclusion: whose story is it?
Despite the complications of a mother and son relationship or perhaps because of them, a significant part of my parents' story has been preserved. While memory and language barriers caused by changes in time, place and space have shaped that story, a word picture of two remarkable people of the 20th Century has been obtained. So it is Anna and Nikolai's story and by extension, my story.
But there is more to it than that. The loss of detail, the minor inconsistencies and selectivity of memory provide challenges to accuracy, authenticity and interpretation. But the power of human memory and experience, whether collective or individual, will always build bridges across the cultural, physical and temporal divide. Enough collective memory remains on which to establish cultural roots and individual identity from which knowledge, truth, and if we are lucky, wisdom can emerge.
As I have illustrated by way of examples, recorded memory in all its forms does not have a single ownership. Yes, it is my parents' story. Yes, it is my story. But today you who remember something of what was presented can now say it is also your story.
The last interview samples I want to play to you is where Anna talks about how she met Nikolai.
Sound recording tracks 6 and 7: How Anna and Nikolai met
Track 6
Translation of track 6
| "There were two Czechs. I did not know much of the language so Mrs. Bodingbauer, she said there is a young man here who can also speak Czech. He is from Czechoslovakia. I believe he is nearby, I will get him. He came, saw us, and did the translating and the matter was finished. He then once asked if I could obtain some theatre tickets as the people were standing in line for them. He also had a few friends but they did not have the time to stand as they worked at the railways. They would like to go, he included, but the line! I said yes I can do that and so I did. Then I was invited to go out. But immediately I noticed - there were the singles quarters, there was a middle passage with rooms left and right. The room directly opposite to mine, the name was there and I knew immediately that it was Russian". |
Track 7
Translation of track 7
| "Yes, it was said it is Russian but he comes from Czechoslovakia, also speaks Czech. So we went out a couple of times. And that's how it goes. [laughter] Not just from today until tomorrow. We simply understood each other. I like going on excursions, dad also.We were on theTraunstein. Went up at night. I simply followed him. The next day coming down I was frightened. I sat and slid down. I laughed. That's how it was. There was no danger. He was not sent here from Soviet Russia. They had to carry their armbands. If you went out with someone sent from Russia you would be locked up. They just do not like seeing it because he is not German." |
Linz, August 1943
"Ein verliebtes Paar -Das ist schrecklich": Two people in love - isn't that dreadful. This was written in my mother's handwriting on the back of the original photograph. My mother is of course referring to the danger of crossing racial and ethnic boundaries in wartime Nazi Germany/Austria. Notice the peeling paint. What else does the photograph reveal?
My parents married on 8 September 1945, exactly four months to the day after the surrender of Germany on 8 May 1945 which was two days before Anna's 36th birthday.
Wedding Photograph: 8 September 1945, Linz, Austria
In 1950 with three children, my parents migrated to Australia and had an addition to the family!
The family in Queanbeyan, NSW, 1952
My parents enjoyed their remaining time visiting the coast.
Anna and Nikolai at Broulee, Batemans Bay 1960's
If oral history does nothing else, it shows the degree in which a common humanity permeates throughout our lives. This is because of human cultural and language diversity not despite of it. A globalisation of this kind is to be applauded but it is not new. Since humans developed culture, cross-cultural dialogue has occurred. Oral history in its modern form simply reminds us that it was always so and will continue to be so. What is important is not whose story it is, its ownership, but that the story is told and kept alive. We are the custodians, it is our story.
Sources
- Four interviews conducted with Anna Jochmann Imaschew between 9 June and 25 October 1994. Interviewer: George Imashev. (Original interviews recorded on ¼ inch reel to reel tape using a UHER portable tape recorder)
- Times Atlas c1988.
George Imashev worked for twenty years at the Australian War Memorial as the Curator of the Film and Sound Collection. He continues to do historical research when not sailing or planning trips with his wife Margaret.