“It is my journey, mine”
: An interdisciplinary narrative analysis of resilience as orienting towards visions of the good life, in three generations of Dutch Holocaust survivors

  • Fieke Bakker

Student thesis: Master's Thesis: Humanistic Studies

Abstract

In this study, I have set out to gain more insight in how three generations of Holocaust survivors give meaning to their lives in the context of the aftermath of the Holocaust. More specifically, I have asked how first-, second-, and third-generation Dutch Holocaust survivors orient themselves toward believable visions of the good. This question was spurred by the conceptualization of the resilient process as a process of eventually standing in relation to believable visions of the good. In the theoretical framework, I set out to explore philosophically what it means to orient oneself in moral space toward visions of the good. With the works of Sara Ahmed and Charles Taylor, I have argued that to orient oneself is to have a sense of identity. Moral space is the space of questions about what is of ultimate importance to a person in their lives; when is a life ‘full’ or ‘worthwhile’? As personal narrative is seen as a favored entry point into such evaluations. I have opted for a reflexive thematic narrative method, which was used to find themes in the visions of the good of the respondents. I analyzed twenty of the 36 interviews contained in the dataset Trauma & Resilience: Intergenerational Holocaust Research from an Existential Perspective (Schuhmann & Immler, 2018). In the interviews, I have found five main themes in the visions of the good of the three generations of Holocaust survivors. These were: being an authentic self, having the right to be, loving relationships, not living in the past/ not being a victim, and being Jewish. In the results, I have emphasized that these visions of the good often stand in clashing or in affirming relations with each other. Based on this insight I have argued that dearly held visions of the good might gain or lose believability vis a vis the vision of the good of the other. I have argued that the Holocaust survivor family can be seen as a moral laboratory, within the family, survivors navigate ethical dilemmas and experiment with ways to repair moral damage. Furthermore, I have found that Holocaust survivor descendants often grow up with a sense of disorientation and that they find orientation in life by certain objects that are endowed with associations of the good and the bad, I have termed these ‘orientation devices’. This study was concluded with a critical analysis of the conceptualization of resilience by Schuhmann and Van der Geugten (2017) and this study’s research approaches. It was found that ‘orienting towards visions of the good’ is a good analytical tool for analyzing meaning in life. It did also shed some light of the difficulty of relating this to resilience, because of some vagueness both in the conceptualization and in the research design. In the end this study has contributed to offering insights in the intricacies of the moral-existential process of finding meaning in life, and the moral dilemmas that survivors are presented with in the Holocaust survivor families.
Date of Award24 Apr 2024
Original languageEnglish
SupervisorJ. M. (Mienke) van der Brug (Supervisor) & Arjan W. Braam (Supervisor)

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