Exploring Women’s Experiences of War Violence and Survival in a Transgenerational Perspective.

Experience of war violence are not bound to the time of intense armed conflict, but travel across generations in the aftermath and influence not only public institutional processes at state level, but also private, intimate relationships. This paper is grounded in feminist IR theories that highlight the impact of war violence and militarisation in everyday life in the aftermath of war. It explores the different ways war experiences are conditioned by and condition familial ties (Ketola and O’Reilly 2025, Ketola 2025) in a transgenerational perspective (Wachsmuth 2008, Jacobs 2023, Attarian 2016). The paper asks how women’s experiences of war violence and their multifaceted, intersectional and contradictory modes of agency (Sjoberg 2013, Coulter 2009) and resilience (Gitau 2022, Berry 2022) developed to survive war travel across generations. War memories have been transmitted within families as stories of trauma and survival; often women have been silent about their war experiences. Exploring the impact of the different ways war memories are transmitted within families and the ways gender, national, class and other identity boundaries intersect in narratives about the impact of these transmissions, this paper draws on ideas and tools from feminist ethnography. It is based on findings from 23 open-ended interviews in which German women whose German mothers or grandmothers survived WWII were asked about the meaning WWII has for them and the ways they learned about the war in their families. A particular emphasis was placed on the learnings from the stories or silences of their grandmothers/mothers who survived WII. In their narratives, family memories of distant historical events (WWII) were reflected as a mirror of the narrators’ own experiences and relationships with their families. First findings highlight the different ways, the sharing and silencing of war experiences in the family impact on political positioning and boundary making post-conflict (Lamont and Molnar 2002). Tendencies to depoliticise the role family members played in the war and NS-regime highlighting the disconnect between public and private memories contrast with a deep critical reflection of family members’ positionings revealing the complexity of war memories and their gendered nature.