Feeling memory remembering wartime childhoods in France

"Feeling Memory considers the recorded oral narratives-memories stories-of over a hundred people who were children in France during the Second World War in order to read them both as a phenomenological exploration of having been a child in war, and as an affective, reflective study of remembering. This duality stems from two basic questions which drove the research. First, what was it like to be a child in France during the Second World War? And second, how can historians, get at that that experience 'from the inside out'? Lindsey Dodd considers the nature and characteristics of memories stories to demonstrate the variety of experiences children had during the Second World War in France, both similar and different. It explores the way remembering is socially and culturally shaped, at both macro and micro levels, and emphasizes the ongoingness of the past as it makes its way into the present. She perceives feeling and imagination as entangled inside the processes of remembering, listening, seeking to understand and to be understood. In sum, Feeling Memory is about how feelings about the past are shared between individuals, groups, and within and across societies with a goal of centering a range of feeling-affects, emotions, moods, sensations, imaginings-as central to lived experience in the past and present. It is a book which uses the French experience of the Second World War as its example, but its principles extend beyond this temporal and geographical case"

What did it feel like to be a child in France during World War II? Feeling Memory is an affective exploration of children s lives in wartime France and the ways they are remembered