Lost and Re-Emerging Knowledge: the Role of Rurality and (Non-)Rurality in Two Sisters’ Post-Migrant Narratives of their Parents’ Second World War Forced Labour

Abstract This article investigates differences in two half-sisters’ (Anita Diestler and Schenja Wrobel) narratives about their (step-)parents’ forced migration and subsequent employment as forced labourers, as well as their own experiences as members of a post-migrant generation. The half-sisters were born as Heimatlose Ausländer (a specific type of ‘stateless foreigner’) in Bavarian villages in the late 1950s and early 1960s, respectively. Diestler was still living there when she was interviewed, while Wrobel had moved to a town in Hesse, another West German federal state, when she was eighteen. Diestler’s report is an example of a narrative embedded in hermetic rural social structures that are part of her implicit knowledge. By contrast, Wrobel, who had left ‘the village’, talks for hours about her parents’ experiences, especially her mother’s life in Ukraine, the characteristics of forced labour on a farm, and her own living conditions as a Heimatlose Ausländer in West Germany. The analysis of the interviews leads to the conclusion that explicit knowledge that emerges from autobiographical storytelling is disappearing in ‘the village’ where the half-sisters grew up, but re-emerging in a different, non-rural, place. Additionally, this article demonstrates that ‘the village’ is not a part of post-migrant society even though both interviewees belong to a post-migrant generation.