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Trauma and Attachment in the Kindertransport Context: German-Jewish Child Refugees’ Accounts of Displacement and Acculturation in Britain
Author: Iris Guske
Date Of Publication: May 2009
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-0503-2
Isbn: 1-4438-0503-3
The present volume is the result of an interdisciplinary oral history research project, which was carried out at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex. It focuses on the Kindertransport, the British rescue operation saving 10,000 predominantly German-Jewish children from Nazi Germany, and is based on in-depth case studies of five child survivors of the Holocaust. Looking at human development over the life cycle as mediated by intervening trauma was at the heart of the project, which examined the making and breaking of a child's close ties to significant others, processes of identity formation under acculturative stress as well as the creation and recall of traumatic memories. The study is thus one of the few in the field of attachment research which sheds light on the lifelong influence which early attachment has on coping with massive cumulative trauma. The former child refugees' narratives are enriched by letters, diaries, or articles written by them and their (host) families as well as by interviews conducted with family members and friends. Consequently, we can look at individual lives and collective destinies from more than one perspective as we are provided with rich, multi-layered accounts of people's whole-life trajectories. While each Holocaust survivor's developmental story is unique, it is, however, linked to the others' by the common experience of negotiating an identity between two countries, cultures, and religions against the background of unparalleled political upheavals, and as such also sheds light on, and offers ways out of, the traumata suffered in present-day contexts of enforced migration and displacement.
Iris Guske is the Director of the Kempten School of Translation and Interpreting Studies, with applied linguistics at the heart of her teaching and professional activities.
She has authored coursebooks for distance-learning students of English at all levels and recently written "Celebrating Saussure's 150th and Halliday's 80th Birthday: Meaning-Making in the First and the Last Quarter of the 20th Century". The bulk of her published research, however, reflects her interest in socio- and psycholinguistics and developmental psychology, e.g. "Psycho- and Sociolinguistic Challenges Impacting on Immigrant Adolescents' Identity Formation", "Characteristics of the Police Occupational Culture and their Implications for the Everyday Experience and Well-Being of Minority Officers", and "Zwischen Anpassung und Abschottung". She is a founding member of the Worldwide Forum on Education and Culture and has lately co-edited the book Education Landscapes in the 21st Century: Cross-Cultural Challenges and Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives with contributions from scholars in the fields of language and literacy education as well as media, communication and (inter-) cultural studies from all five continents.
Price Uk Gbp: 44.99
Price Us Usd: 67.99
Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)
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