Il Mulino - Rivisteweb

Roswitha Breckner, Monica Massari Past, present and future of biographical research. A dialogue with Gabriele Rosenthal (doi: 10.1423/93563)

Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia (ISSN 0486-0349) Fascicolo 1, gennaio-marzo 2019

Ente di afferenza: Universitatale di Milano (unimi)

Copyright c by Societ`aeditrice il Mulino, Bologna. Tutti i diritti sono riservati. Per altre informazioni si veda https://www.rivisteweb.it

Licenza d’uso L’articolo `emesso a disposizione dell’utente in licenza per uso esclusivamente privato e personale, senza scopo di lucro e senza fini direttamente o indirettamente commerciali. Salvo quanto espressamente previsto dalla licenza d’uso Rivisteweb, `efatto divieto di riprodurre, trasmettere, distribuire o altrimenti utilizzare l’articolo, per qualsiasi scopo o fine. Tutti i diritti sono riservati. INTERVISTA

Past, present and future of biographical research A dialogue with Gabriele Rosenthal

by Roswitha Breckner and Monica Massari

Within the so-called biographical movement (Bertaux 1981), which from the early 1980s has contributed to re-orient socio- logical perspectives to grasp the embeddedness of biographies in social macrostructures, mechanisms and processes, especially the mutual relations existing between the experiential world of people’s lives and societal developments, the work of Gabriele Rosenthal stands among the most inspiring ones. Combining a conceptual and methodological reflection with extensive field re- search, both in Europe and in the Global South, she has aimed at valuing the histories and stories of people often marginalised by sociological research. Gabriele Rosenthal offers in the following dense dialogue an account of the development of biographical research in the sociological debate. Her work is aimed at stressing the close links existing between biographical methods and the most outstand- ing traditions of social theory – such as social constructivism, interactionism, phenomenology, Grounded Theory, figurational sociology and the interpretive paradigm, as she mentions below. Furthermore, Gabriele’s research has had as a recurrent focus the social constellations of circumstances which often constraint people into relatively powerless and hard to hear and to tell positions. Her studies on the experiences of Holocaust survivors as well as Nazi perpetrators and their influence on the subse- quent generations as well as her works on migration, violence, ethnicity, collective and armed conflicts and trauma have had a strong impact on several generations of researchers. Interviewed in her office at the Georg-August-University of Goettingen, where she teaches Qualitative Methodology at the Center of Methods in Social Sciences, she embarked for two

RASSEGNA ITALIANA DI SOCIOLOGIA / a. LX, n. 1, gennaio-marzo 2019 156 Roswitha Breckner and Monica Massari hours in an intense dialogue with the co-editors of this special issue ranging on a wide number of topics which we think vividly contribute to depict the past, present and future perspectives of biographical research in Europe and elsewhere.

Roswitha Breckner: Biographical research started in sociology with the work of William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-1920), and contin- ued in the context of the Chicago School from the 1920s to the 1940s, but was pushed into the background after functionalism became dominant in sociology. It had a revival in the late 1970s and was taken up mainly by scholars who were interested in developing qualitative methodologies, narrative theories and, more generally, empirically employing the theory of everyday life of Alfred Schütz. Since then, the biographical approach has been expanding in different disciplines (such as history, educational studies, social work), as well as with a huge variety of topics. If you look at this history, what in your view were the relevant impulses and lines of discussion that have driven biographical research forward?

Gabriele Rosenthal: First of all, I must say that the most important impulse for biographical research in sociology – and I stress that I am speaking from the perspective of a sociolo- gist – was the study by Thomas and Znaniecki. It was the first generation of sociologists in Chicago. Thus, biographical research has been part of sociology from the very beginning. Today, The Polish Peasant still has a great impact on the way we are doing biographical research, although some of it was forgotten and then rediscovered. For example, working with a combination of differ- ent qualitative methods of data collection and not concentrating exclusively on single interviews or written autobiographies, as well as the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. This was the starting point of biographical research. It was also multi- sited research: some of my students think that this is something new and very fashionable, but Thomas and Znaniecki, already at that time, analysed the situation in Poland and the US, saw what was going on in both societies. A third point is the very strong connection with practice, such as social work or town planning. Finally, they were interested in developing sociological theory, while nowadays I have the impression that some sociolo- gists have forgotten this. My main problem with biographical A dialogue with Gabriele Rosenthal 157 research today is that it is considered as a separate field and I see no efforts to interact with other fields of sociology, especially with sociological theory.

RB: How was the situation in Germany where you got in touch with biographical research first, which, however, was embed- ded in an international field?

GR: As you mentioned before, biographical research came to German-speaking countries only in the 1970s, connected with the revival of what we had already in the Chicago School with qualitative methods. Of course, this gap in the development of qualitative and biographical methods in Germany also had some- thing to do with the so-called Third Reich, since the majority of German sociologists emigrated in the 1930s, among them Alfred Schütz. After the war, a starting point for sociology in Germany, besides the Frankfurt School with Adorno and Horkheimer, was Talcott Parsons and quantity-oriented methods. In the 1950s and 1960s there was some qualitative research, such as the work of Heinrich Popitz, Hans Paul Bahrdt and others in the field of industrial sociology. But it was in the 1970s that biographical methods started to be adopted more systematically. Martin Kohli was very influential in Germany in bringing this into the discus- sion, and also for the constitution of the Section for Biographical Research in the German Sociological Association. I studied in Constance with Kurt Lüscher, and Kohli was his assistant at that time. Bruno Hildenbrand was my first encounter with biographi- cal research; he did his PhD on family and illness with the help of Richard Grathoff who had done his PhD at the New School for Social Research in New York under the supervision of Aron Gurwitsch, Thomas Luckmann and Peter L. Berger. But in the beginning it was mainly Martin Kohli, together with Daniel Ber- taux from France (see Bertaux, Kohli 1984). Then a very strong impulse came from Fritz Schütze who, especially methodologically, made a big step forward in biographical research. Still today, in the German-speaking countries, but also increasingly elsewhere, the majority of us are using the biographical-narrative interview as it was introduced by Schütze (Schütze 2008). He supervised a lot of PhDs and research projects, such as those by Gerhard Riemann on narrative interviewing of psychiatric patients, or Lena Inowlocki’s multigenerational studies of Holocaust survivors, as 158 Roswitha Breckner and Monica Massari well as of migration. These studies are strongly based on the Chicago School and the theory of symbolic interactionism.

Monica Massari: You have just pointed out the common ground existing between the Chicago School and biographical re- search that was taken up in the 1970s and the 1980s. I would like to ask you whether you see differences or other impulses that came in which were not based in the Chicago School or in symbolic interactionism?

GR: It is very difficult to say, because the main tradition that we are using in Western Europe, and especially in German- speaking countries, is the social constructivism of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. Besides interactionism there is phenom- enology, as developed by Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schütz, which became a stronger part of biographical research than in the Chicago School. Moreover, Grounded Theory and Anselm Strauss had, and still have, a strong influence on biographical research. So, I would say that the major impulses came from all the theories that are embedded in the interpretive paradigm, as Thomas Wilson (1970) named it. To put it more critically, I would also like to stress, as I mentioned before, that we lost most of the connection with general sociology. I think it has something to do with the fact that biographical research in Germany, and even more so in other countries, was in an outsider position in sociology. At the beginning it was fruitful that the group of biographical researchers was very interdisciplinary, but I think that we have to rethink how to establish a closer dialogue with general sociological theory and how to connect our work with general sociology more tightly again.

RB: We have mostly referred to the German-speaking countries. But when you consider a wider international perspective, which are in your perception similarities or differences in the development of the different sociologies in the UK, in the US or even in the Global South, so in different parts of the world where biographi- cal research is carried out?

GR: I think that there is a big problem that we are German- oriented or Western European-oriented and this has something to do, first of all, with the language barrier. I experienced this A dialogue with Gabriele Rosenthal 159 for example in Italy when I went to an international confer- ence where people could not easily speak with each other in English. In the beginning of biographical research the Italians were more on board, and so were the French, such as Daniel Bertaux. Besides the language barrier, there are two other topics which are important and that explain why it has not developed further. First of all, we have to consider the small numbers of professorships for sociology and especially for qualitative research in other countries, especially in the Global South. In Germany, we are in a luxury situation, with several professorships for qualitative research, and biographical research has become part of our teaching activities Another point is funding: who gets grants to travel to world congresses? While I was the president of Research Committee 38 «Biography & Society» of the International Sociological As- sociation (ISA), at the World Congress in Durban, South Africa, we had dinner with other colleagues and I asked them «Who got a grant?». All the Germans who were sitting at the table got one, but hardly anyone from other countries. This is just one example. And another point is that, unfortunately, American sociology, like German sociology, is ahistorical, but for different reasons. I think that this has to do with American history and in Ger- many, obviously, it has to do with German history, but I have always felt that Italian-, Spanish- or French-speaking biographical researchers are not so ahistorically oriented.

RB: Can you give us some examples?

GR: In Italy, for example, I think of the work of Luisa Passerini or Alessandro Portelli.

MM: This also has to do with the close links existing between biographical methods and oral history: the two Italian scholars that you mentioned are historians, not sociologists, so they are perceived as coming from a different field.

GR: Yes, and it is important for our discipline that we need historians… I come from the tradition of Max Weber and his major work on historical developments, but in Germany we have forgotten the historical link. Also in Greece the connection 160 Roswitha Breckner and Monica Massari between oral history and biographical research is much stronger than in Germany. In the Global South, research depends on the funds avail- able. I think that there must be much more effort to support the development of biographical research in the Global South, as well as to have more transnational conferences organised in these countries.

MM: Just to continue this line of the connection with oral history, you stressed the fact that the historical part of sociology was important for the classics but then retreated to the background or almost disappeared. You mentioned National Socialism as one reason not to touch history in Germany, or not to touch history from a US perspective. For Germany the reasons are obvious, but what do you mean when you say that American sociology forgot its historical path?

GR: Do you think that US sociologists have worked much on slavery? I think they started not so long ago.

RB: Do you mean because the colonial history was not present in the US sociology so much?

GR: Yes, and it has something to do with the fact that if you are a new discipline, like sociology in the late 19th and beginning of the 20th century, Emile Durkheim’s idea to separate sociology from psychology and history sounds good in order to establish and institutionalise it as a discipline. This is completely different from the idea of Verstehende Soziologie (interpretive sociology) in Germany, which always kept its relation, for example, with philosophy. And we have to think why the Critical Theory of Horkheimer and Adorno is not fashionable anymore. In Germany it is very clear that this has something to do with our history before 1945 and the ones who became professors of sociology in Germany after 1945. To put it simply, most of them were able to become professors only because their Jewish-German com- petitors had been driven away or were murdered by the Nazis. Today, there is still a total resistance to anything which has to do with psychoanalysis. So there is a tendency to keep strong borders between disciplines, and claims of interdisciplinarity are just a myth. I mean, the main argument against my work has A dialogue with Gabriele Rosenthal 161 always been: this is not sociology. And I have learned simply to answer: so what, maybe it’s good psychology or history or something else. But I could only say this after I got my profes- sorship. Before, I tried to legitimise myself and insisted that I am a genuine sociologist, and avoided, for example, to quote Sigmund Freud.

RB: We would like to go back to your personal encounter with biographical methods. In the framework of your PhD research on the Hitler Youth generation this method came very prominent into your work. Could you tell us how that happened, how it developed?

GR: During my studies in Constance I had no connection to biographical research, I was more generally interested in qualitative methods. I also studied psychology and it was the time when it was fashionable to study patterns of interpretation. When I came to Berlin in 1979, I had the idea of doing some- thing about the Hitler Youth and their patterns of interpretation. This was the starting point, and my interest in this generation had family reasons. So, I realised very quickly: I cannot work on their thinking and their cognitive patterns only, I need to know what they experienced. With this in mind, I started to read about biographical research. This was the beginning. It really came from the subject matter. It was the time when the first papers by Fritz Schütze and Martin Kohli, not published, but just as distributed papers, were being circulated. And then I was also strongly influenced by the objective hermeneutics of Ulrich Oevermann (Oevermann et al. 1987). This was not bio- graphical research, but the method was important.

RB: You published your first two books on the Hitler Youth generation and their experiences and how they tried, in some way, to de-politicise their past in the Hitler Youth (Rosenthal 1986; 1987; 1989). But you worked out how this, and their identification with the Nazi System in general, became visible in their narra- tions anyhow. So, you also did a kind of detective work with the interviews in order to uncover something that was strongly pushed under the carpet discursively in society. What kind of reaction did your book arouse when it came out? 162 Roswitha Breckner and Monica Massari

GR: On the one hand, I got very, very strong support from the former Hitler Youth members I had interviewed and who realized that I had worked on their stories and experiences. They read the first manuscript and they told me: «Here there is somebody who really wants to know what we experienced». But the feedback from colleagues was very different. It was rather frosty and I did not understand it in the beginning. On the surface it was not directly aggressive, it was more in the direction of «This is not sociology, you should have done your PhD in history», or that I had a totally wrong understanding of the Hitler Youth: «They were not so much politically oriented and not so much identified with the Nazi system» as I presented it… there were many reactions like these. It took me some time before I realised, on the one hand, that this corresponds to the hegemonic discourse in Germany and, on the other, that I was doing research on the generation of my professors and had provoked defensive reactions. This defence, and the need to uncover more of the denied parts of the past, became even stronger when I did later research on members of the older generations who denied their involvement in Nazi crimes.

MM: Can you tell us something about the moment when you decided to interview former members of the Hitler Youth?

GR: There were several situations – especially during the time when I was a student at the University of Constance – in which I realised that I do not have a typical German family history – and I started to read more about the Third Reich. My parents were in the Hitler Youth and in the Bund Deutscher Mädel [BDM – the female youth organisation of the NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party] and identified with the Nazi ideology till the end of the war. On the other hand, my grandparents on both sides were against the Nazis. My grandpa on my father’s side tried, amongst other things, to support the Jewish owners of the steel mill of which he was a director; he fought without success against the so-called «Aryanisations», and helped a Jewish engineer to get out of a concentration camp close to Strasbourg. During the Nazi period, my grandpa on my mother’s side still openly identified with the German monarchy and not the Nazis. This family constellation caused a lot of dy- namics within my family. While my grandparents were more or A dialogue with Gabriele Rosenthal 163 less silent, and I had to go to archives in order to find out more about my paternal grandfather, my parents talked a lot about their time in the Hitler Youth. Already during my adolescence, I started to realise that the way my father treated me was similar to the methods and propaganda that he had been subjected to during the Kinderlandverschickung [the evacuation of children in Germany during World War II] and the stern treatment by the leaders of the Hitler Youth: I realised that some of the things my father told me about what he suffered at that time were the same as what he did to me. So, I started to think about what was behind this, and I saw that the experiences of this generation have a very strong influence on our present. How this idea transformed into a PhD, that was a long process, it was not a single situation.

RB: It was a sort of self-reflective drive...

GR: Yes, it was. I also remember a situation in Israel. In a conversation with an Israeli student of mine, I said: «Maybe in my family there was some philo-Semitism, but no anti-Semitism». And she replied: «It could not be that a German family was not anti-Semitic!». This drove me to look closer at the past and I went to the archive and found very detailed files about my grandpa. But the main impulse was just to read more, to know more, why the majority in Germany did not want to talk about the Nazi past. And here I remember that Martin Kohli held a seminar in Constance about the work of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich on The Inability to Mourn (Mitscherlich, Mitscherlich 1975), on the impossibility or on the impossibility or inability to mourn, that the Germans were identified with the Nazis and that they were unable to mourn that Germany lost the Third Reich. In the 1970s, it was a very influential book from a psychoanalytic perspective and had quite an influence on me.

RB: This was a kind of explanation why people refused to talk about the Nazi past. You have also been working on older and younger generations than the Hitler Youth and their different relations to the Nazi time. You even developed a kind of compre- hensive multigenerational model, based on Mannheim’s concept of generation, for understanding how transmission from one generation to the next works in specific societal contexts. 164 Roswitha Breckner and Monica Massari

GR: Yes, after my research on the Hitler Youth generation, I first did research on the generation of men who were soldiers in the First World War, most of whom born from 1893 to 1900 were again recruited at the beginning of the Second World War. This is the generation of the parents of the Hitler Youth, who were often traumatised – I mean the males of this generation – by their experiences in the trenches. Also, my students and I did interviews with the historical generation between these two genealogical generations, the so-called Weimar youth generation (born around 1906-1919). And it became very obvious how strongly this middle generation denied their involvement in Nazi politics and the persecution and murder of Jews and other persecuted groupings. It needed a lot of research – besides the analysis of the interviews also research in archives – to reconstruct the past of the interviewees.

RB: This brings me to the methodological criticism biographi- cal research is often confronted with, in the sense that biography researchers are naive enough to take as facts what people tell them. How did you experience this criticism and how did you start to deal with it?

GR: I have been strongly influenced by Alfred Schütz and the sociology of knowledge but also by the Gestalt theory. The combination of Gestalt theory and phenomenology as it was in- troduced by Aron Gurwitsch (1964) was for me the highlight in my theoretical education regarding the interrelation between an event, experience, memory and talking about it in the present. While phenomenology is concentrated on the analysis of how we perceive a phenomenon – the Noesis – Gestalt theory is more focused on the Noema – the appearance of the phenomenon.

MM: Could you explain how the theory developed by Gur- witsch helped you in your own research?

GR: In my opinion, this theory helps us to reconstruct the interrelations between the events people experience, their experi- ences, their memories, and the way they talk about them. Talking about the past is not only constituted by the present but also by the past. Patterns of interpretation and stocks of knowledge are biographically constituted and are not constructed only in A dialogue with Gabriele Rosenthal 165 the present of talking about the past. In my research I try not only to reconstruct the rules of the current discourses and how people present themselves, how they talk in the present of the interview. I also want to know what is going on in social reality in the present. This means, for example, that I also work with participant observation. But I also want to know what was going on in the past and how it is re-interpreted. I assume that we get some hints of the Noema, to put it in a phenomenological way, not of the event itself, but of how the historical event was experienced 20-40 years ago.

RB: Well, this is the core point of your methodological and theoretical contribution to biographical research, the relation be- tween the lived and the told life (Rosenthal 1993; 1995). Could you tell us a bit more about this concept, which has become really influential in biographical research? Maybe also give a concrete example of it?

GR: I think that a crucial point in biographical analysis is not that I think we can differentiate between the lived-through life and the narrated or presented life (Rosenthal 2018). They are interconnected but we have to differentiate them on a meth- odological level. What really matters is the method: to separate it into two different analytical steps. For the development of this method of case reconstruction, I was strongly influenced by the work of Wolfram Fischer who discussed the difference between the present perspective and the past perspective (Fischer 1982). From my student days on, I had one question: how can we explain the relationship between individual and society and between events, experiences, memory and narration? How can we overcome this dichotomous thinking of individuals and society, or, to put it in another way, of the general and the individual? Here the Gestalt theorists were extremely helpful. It is clear that if somebody talks today about her or his experiences, the nar- ration is constituted by their present perspective. So, I thought that in the analysis we need to separate the present and the past perspectives, if we want to develop hypotheses about what people experienced in the past (and the past can be yesterday), and how they present it. And I was also influenced by Ulrich Oevermann: he never did biographical research, but he was asked to show how he would analyse a biographical interview, 166 Roswitha Breckner and Monica Massari and he brought in, at this step of analysis, the biographical data (Oevermann et al. 1980). This was something that I really considered as an important tool. So when we make the list of biographical data we also include historical and collective data.

MM: This relationship between the lived and told life is the core of the analytical process, if I am correct. It is from confront- ing these two different levels of analysis that the structure of the case derives. So, I am interested in understanding the hermeneutic reconstruction of the case. It is directed at finding exactly what? The rules, for example, that social actors follow in perceiving the sequence of actions of their life, or the rules that they follow in shaping, let’s say, the sequence of actions of their life?

GR: The method of biographical case reconstruction that I have developed follows a sequential approach in which the tem- poral structure of both the narrated life story and the experienced life history is analysed. In other words, there are two aims: the first is to reconstruct the sequentiality of the life history and the second is to reconstruct how people present their life. The reconstruction of the told life, the life story in contrast to the experienced life, the life history, means to discover the rules underlying the genesis of the biographical narration presented in the present of the interview or, in more general terms, the self- presentation. Here, in contrast to our analysis of the experienced life history, we do not consider how the biographer experienced an event at the time it took place. In this step, the analysis is focused on the question why the biographer has presented him or herself in this particular way, whether intentionally or unconsciously. We ask for example how far the self-presentation is constituted by hegemonic discourses, how far it is constituted by social taboos, or by the person’s own experiences. And, of course, the framing of an interview, which means the framing of the situation has a strong influence on the way we present ourselves. When analysing the life history, in another step of analysis we try to reconstruct the genesis of the experienced life. We ask what is the sequentiality of the experiences, what were the perspectives in the past and how we could explain the differences to the present perspective. A dialogue with Gabriele Rosenthal 167

MM: This leads us to your other major study of three generations of victims and perpetrators of the Nazi regime and the meaning of the Holocaust (Rosenthal 2010). I am very much interested in your analysis of the lives of those who were victimised and their descendants, but also of those who were perpetrators and their descendants. So, here the generational component is pretty crucial in analysing lives which are full of violence, either when violence is an act that they actually perpetrated or when they were the object of violence executed by somebody else. If you can tell us a bit more about this important research.

GR: I think that the main lessons I learned were from empirical research and not so much from contemplating at my desk. For example, the importance of silence, and the impact of silence on the following generations, and in general the strong impact of the past on the following generation, especially when it is not transmitted on a manifest level. This was already a result of my earlier research on the veterans of the First World War. I realised that the experience of the grandfathers who had been in the trenches was not part of the dialogue in the families. Sometimes it happened that family members were together with me during the interview. Since I interviewed men between 88 and 100 years old, often their children arranged the interview, hoping that finally their fathers could speak about their past experiences. And it became clear how little they knew about the experiences of their fathers in the trenches of the First World War. At that time, I also started to reflect more on the silence about this time in my own family. I remember when I found the uniform of my grandfather from the First World War in the attic of my parents’ house, I said to my mother: «Oh, he must have been a soldier in the war», but she replied «No, no, he was not a soldier», and I said «But I found the uniform!»; so she answered: «But he did not speak about it». A result of my research was that I then started to work more on Karl Mannheim’s concept of historical generations (Mannheim 1952), the interrelation between the sequences of historical and familial generations, the family dialogue, the difference between both sequences and kinds of generations, and on transgenerational work between the generations. But let me address your question on the research I did on the three generations of victims and perpetrators of the Nazi regime. 168 Roswitha Breckner and Monica Massari

During my time in Israel, where I was invited by Dan Bar-On to teach biographical methods at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, I conducted interviews with Holocaust survivors and I had close contacts with their children and grandchildren. I also realised the strong, enormous influence of the past on them. But I also realised the differences between families of survivors and families of perpetrators in respect of the family dialogue and the impact on the next generations. Together with Dan Bar-On, I developed the idea of doing a three-generations study on the families of victims and perpetrators of the Nazi regime and studying the differences (Rosenthal 2010). Since this study, I cannot stop thinking in a historical and in a transgen- erational way. Conducting research on several generations of a family is not only doing research on the family history. This is the best way to get an insight into the history of the family, and as well into the history of maybe the clan, the local, the ethnic or religious or political we-group, or other larger collectivities. Let me add some comments on traumatisation: it’s a fact that the second and third generations of victims sometimes develop symptoms similar to those of the first generation, and this has consequences for the present, even when the traumatising events happened long ago. I think it’s a disaster that trauma is not considered by most sociologists as a proper sociological subject. Our past has so many collective traumas, and now with refugees and migrants coming to Europe, we experience a similar situ- ation, since they bring such traumatic experiences with them, both individually and collectively, i.e. as collective and not purely individual experiences. We need to carry out more studies of this.

MM: This is really a crucial topic. Refugees’ memories and, particularly, their traumatic accounts solicit us, as researchers, to look at the historical, political and social origins of the suffering they embody. Their memories tend to dismantle the moral and cultural terrain we thought we had gained. But this probably happens also in research in the Global South, as you have been doing during the past years. Are there major similarities or differences in the ways people, yesterday and today, talk about the horror and the unspeakable experiences they have faced during their own lives?

GR: Yes, there are similarities in the symptoms of traumati- sation due to collective and familial events. The differences are A dialogue with Gabriele Rosenthal 169 constituted by the cultural milieus or social milieus and their «traditions», in the sense of established socio-cultural codes of activity and interpretation. All this has an influence on the awareness and interpretation of the symptoms and ways of deal- ing with them. Also whether remembering and speaking about their traumatic experiences has a value, or if forgetting is a more important value. Several of our interviewees in Northern Uganda do not interpret their nightmares purely, or mainly, as consequences of their traumatic experiences during the civil war or during the time when they were abducted by rebel groups, but as caused by the spirits of the victims of their own deeds or the deeds they had witnessed (Bogner, Rosenthal 2017a).

MM: The topics that we focus on are often linked to our interests, our passions, our curiosity but, in some cases, they are also very much linked to our capacity to pursue our objectives, our goals with discipline. Dealing with the current regime of migration in Europe requires self-discipline in our work and our overall methodological framework. This emerges very clearly from your research. What you said about your study of the Holocaust and the three generations of victims and perpetrators of the Nazi regime, or the untold stories of victims of collective violence in Northern Uganda, well, in all these cases we are faced by traumatic memories or traumatising memories which convey to researchers very contrasting feelings and emotions. Sometimes it can be very difficult to detach yourself from these stories. This drives me to ask you about reflexivity: how do you approach, during your research and, particularly, during the interview process, and then in the analysis, the crucial dilemma between involvement and distance?

GR: The advantage of doing research in the Global South (Rosenthal, Bogner 2017) is that you experience more interaction crises, such as little disturbances or crises in the field, and you realise that you need to know more about what you are doing. You need to reflect more on your role, for example as a white woman, a professor, and one who is from Germany and doing field studies in Palestine or Uganda. So, it forces you to think about yourself in the setting of the interview and to look for a good balance between detachment and involvement. For me, analysis of the interviews is the step where I experience more detachment, in contrast to the situation of the interview or 170 Roswitha Breckner and Monica Massari actual observation. When I start to write, to present the case, then I am more involved in the process of negotiating between involvement and detachment, and I think that it needs a strong apparatus of psychological defence in order not to be over- whelmed. It also needs supervision. And of course, in general, the possibility to talk about it, especially with the research team, but also in dialogue with our interviewees. Whenever possible, I do several interviews with the same person. Sometimes at the second meeting the interviewee tells us how he or she felt during the first encounter, or says that he or she assumes that we did not understand something correctly or that I behaved in a strange way.

MM: There is another relevant topic that we want to address with you and which has to do with the question of misrecogni- tion, discrimination and racism that we are experiencing in Europe against migrants and refugees nowadays, or in general against people perceived or just constructed as others. Unfortunately, I live in a country where this phenomenon is getting worse and worse… So, we are more often confronted with refugees’ traumatic memories, where at the end we say: «Thank you very much for having shared with me such a dramatic experience and memory», while you feel extremely powerless and you have to deal with your own feeling of frustration, not only as a scholar but also as a citizen and human being. So, I just wanted to share with you my feelings and listen to your views on that.

GR: I don’t make such a clear difference in an encounter between being a sociologist or a therapist or just a human being. First of all, traumatisation produces speechlessness and survivors need help in order to thematise it, and communicating or the- matising it means sharing it, and this is already a very important step. When I am in an interview and I have the feeling that I can help the person to speak, I am in the first place a human being wondering how far I can help. For example, a refugee woman from Syria in Melilla told me that since she didn’t man- age to cross the border together with her five-year-old daughter, the daughter had had to stay with her uncle several days longer. The consequence was that the daughter could not sleep at night without holding the hand of her mother. Also during the war in Syria, the daughter experienced several situations when she was A dialogue with Gabriele Rosenthal 171 separated from her mother. When I learned about this, I offered to interview the daughter and did drawings with her. The girl decided to draw the destroyed houses and cars on the street in her Syrian home town – destroyed by bomb attacks. And with the support of her mother and her older sister, we were able to speak about the much safer situation in the present and also draw a picture of that. So, if I see a chance that I can help, for example by offering to do a family interview, then I do it. In other words, I don’t have the feeling that interviewees only give something to me, I also give back. I give back what I can do as a human being and as a sociologist with some therapeutic training.

MM: In this way you get involved in the field you are study- ing in an active way?

GR: Yes I do. Also in another way: in the case of some of the refugees my co-workers and I interviewed in the Spanish enclaves in North Africa, we stay in contact on WhatsApp or Facebook (Rosenthal et al. 2017). Or to give you another ex- ample: in West Nile (Uganda), Artur Bogner and I had a group discussion with some invalids who had been mutilated by rebels or by landmines. They asked us to write to the government in order to get some financial support. We refused this request, because we wanted them to become active themselves, but we helped them to organise an NGO and they managed to get funding for every member. To do such little things, I would say this is something that we can do as human beings and should not say this is a task only for therapists. But of course, it often leaves you with a strong feeling of being helpless. Well, I can say, again, I need good psychological defences in order to go on with my work and not stay in a depressive and passive mood. But for me it’s clear: I am a sociologist, I am not a politician, so I can only do what my skills allow me to do. Probably this is, let’s say, my justification for not being more politically active. But I think that if we manage as sociologists to bring this topic more into the academic discourse, then it’s a first step which is really important. To be politically active is an important thing – a very important thing. But to do good sociology is a very important thing, too. It is a different kind of activity and the one cannot replace the other. 172 Roswitha Breckner and Monica Massari

RB: Sometimes there is criticism of biographical research from people who say that when we just jump into the field and we touch traumatic experiences that we are not really trained to deal with, a biographical interview might re-traumatise more than being helpful. This is part of discussions that you surely have encoun- tered many times.

GR: It is an ongoing argument in the interview training I do.

RB: So, what would you answer to this kind of criticism on doing biographical research in vulnerable fields?

GR: There are several counter-arguments: first of all, as I have already said, silence or more precisely silencing, can be traumatising. Should we say that only therapists can deal with people who are traumatised? The way we do narrative inter- views does not involve putting pressure on our interviewees to talk, for example, about being raped… For example, Artur Bogner and myself once experienced the following situation: we had submitted an article about our research in West Nile (Bogner, Rosenthal 2014). We quoted an interview that Artur had conducted with a woman who was hinting with her body language that she had been raped. Artur asked her if she was raped and she told about the situation when she was raped and wounded by several rebels. You cannot imagine how we were criticised when we submitted the article: that’s voyeurism, men are not allowed to ask such questions, this has no sociological relevance (!) and things like that. But after this interview, the woman founded an NGO for women raped by the rebels and other victims of war violence, and it was very helpful for her and these other victims. I can go on with examples like this. When somebody makes hints that they would like to talk about something, I can ask: «Do you want to talk about it?». We are not using methods of strong interventions, we do not force people to talk about things they don’t want to talk about. We do not use hypnosis or anything like that. But I do think that it is important to have at least two meetings with interviewees, or at least a telephone call some days after the interview.

MM: This implies establishing close contacts with your inter- viewees and also planning long periods of fieldwork, to facilitate A dialogue with Gabriele Rosenthal 173 the establishment of mutual trust between interviewee and inter- viewer. Something that biographical researchers have clearly insisted on from the very beginning.

GR: Yes, I started to realise that when I did my research on Holocaust survivors. And the feedback I got from them encour- aged me to go on with what I was doing. I started with scenic memories and this is, by the way, a much stronger intervention. A survivor would tell me, for example: «I cannot remember when I came to Auschwitz, I only hear the dogs barking», and I would ask them «Do you want to remember?» and if they said «Yes», I tried to help them to remember (Rosenthal 2003). To experience how helpful it could be, to let what is stuck in your body come out as language, this gave me the courage to go on in the way I do. A further counterargument is that people who have been trau- matised for a long time have much stronger defence mechanisms than we assume. They know what it means to talk. My students sometimes say that the interviewees cannot sleep the night after the interview, and I tell them: phone them, ask them, and they will tell you how they feel about the interview. Yes, they know that they will not sleep afterwards, but many of them prefer to talk and not be silenced.

RB: You are trained to use this kind of tool and you know how to deal with strong emotions that come up during interviews when we touch on traumas, so you are not afraid if people cry. You know that sometimes it’s better to cry than not to, because it is a kind of relief from strong repressed emotions. However, in our training courses, while we should include this kind of knowledge and tools, it is clear that not everybody will be able to go that far into these areas of experience.

GR: It is part of every interview training course we offer. I do not give permission to do interviews to students who didn’t attend the interview training; I have a unit on symptoms of traumatisation in every research seminar I hold with students, and I send my co-workers into supervision. It needs to be a part of interview training. The majority of sociologists believe that we don’t have to train people to do interviews. They think 174 Roswitha Breckner and Monica Massari that we only have to prepare a good interview guide and then it will work, but this is really out of touch with reality.

RB: Maybe this has something to do with the difficulty sociol- ogy sometimes has in dealing with emotions. Some consider that emotions are not part of sociology, so that there is resistance to the idea of going into areas of experience where strong emotions are involved. This might be part of that too.

GR: Yes, I agree with what you say. And of course, not everybody is able to do it and should know his or her limits. You cannot go for example into an interview with refugees from the civil war in Syria, if you are aware that you will not be able to listen when they talk about people who were killed around them. You have to take it into careful consideration. I mean, it can happen in any interview that you are confronted with very burdensome memories, because a lot of people are traumatised. Just take into consideration the official numbers of women who have experienced sexualised violence in their lives; in Germany, this is every fourth women. How can we know who is sitting in front of us in an interview? So, interview training is necessary.

RB: There has been a lot of criticism against biographical re- search stressing that it is too subjective and too psychological, as you said before. This criticism, also in theoretical terms, has been mostly articulated by people doing discourse analysis who argue that we have a naïve concept of the subject because we stick to a nineteenth century concept of the actor as the creator of the world. Related to that criticism, there is also the claim that we don’t take power relations into account enough.

GR: First of all, I have to admit, I still belong to the old school of Interpretive Sociology and I am still convinced that social reality does not exist without actors and that we have to include the micro-level in our analysis. We have to see what individuals are doing, how they are interacting and their pat- terns of interpretation. Here, I am really old-fashioned. However, this approach never conceived the individual as being someone like Robinson Crusoe. Instead, the assumption is that patterns of interpretation and our actions are based on social construc- tions, that is on collective construction. So, here I would counter A dialogue with Gabriele Rosenthal 175 the argument of being too subjective, of sticking too much to individual subjectivity. What is true is that power relations, in the sociology of knowledge, do tend to be ignored, and I think that we have to remind ourselves, as sociologists, that in the beginning this tradition was connected with Karl Mannheim. And there is a strong connection between Mannheim and Elias. The problematic development is the exclusive focus on Alfred Schütz. Nothing against this tradition, which is correctly named by Thomas Luckmann as «proto-sociology», but Mannheim, Elias, and others belonging to this tradition of sociology of knowledge, carried out empirical historical work. It was not just a general theory. In collaboration with Artur Bogner (Bogner, Rosenthal 2017b), I am working more and more with a combination of social constructivism and figurational sociology. Elias helps us to see the individual in interrelation with other individuals, to see that every individual belongs to different we-groups, and that what we experience also depends on the image that others have of me and us, how they see us. Norbert Elias says it very clearly: individual in the singular does not exist (see Elias 1978). Further, power is the main concept in his theory, since no interaction is without a balance of power. We need to think of this as a pro- cess, since power is not static, is something always in a process. And of course discourses have an immense influence: this starts with how we define ourselves, and how the discourses in our we-groups inform and constrain this self-definition, what are the rules that govern how I present myself, and how this is determined by the discourses of others about ourselves. We have to take this into consideration. But I think that, if we look only at discourses, we risk missing a very important part of social reality. We have to do both. For example, in the fields where I have been working during the past few years, in Uganda and Palestine, it’s so simple to reconstruct the collective discourses. Very quickly, you realise that in Northern Uganda everybody is talking about reconciliation, so that a myth about the culture of reconciliation is produced, but the returnees, the former child soldiers are discriminated and stigmatised. You have to look at what is actually going on, in contrast to the discourse. There- fore, I have problems with sticking only to discourse analysis: it risks losing the connection with social reality, which is more than discourse. 176 Roswitha Breckner and Monica Massari

RB: I remember that one of the results of working in Pales- tine and Israel was that the collective discourse tended to replace descriptions of people’s own experiences. So, how did you deal with situations where it was difficult to get narratives about what people had experienced?

GR: The best access to narrations of personal experiences was interviews with outsiders. This is an ongoing discovery: if you speak to people who are not inside the group of the established, they break the rules. So you have to see where is the entrance point to get beyond the dominant discourse, and sometimes it needs three meetings, three interviews, and it needs observation, and it needs group discussions. We have recently started, one year ago, a research project in Amman on different groupings of refugees and migrants there. It’s always the same: you can bring together whom you want, Palestinians in Jordan and Jordanian Jordanians, as they call themselves, and they will tell you that they don’t have conflicts, that they are all one people. But I only have to say «Black September», and then you see that this harmonising we-image breaks down.

RB: And what happened in this situation?

GR: Somebody, of course from the Palestinian side, started to tell how difficult it was referring[ to the conflict between the Jordanian army and the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1970/1971], that many people were killed, and the Jordanians wanted to end the dialogue, and said «No, this is not true… it’s history of more than forty years ago». They don’t say «It did not happen», they tell you «It has no relevance for the present». So it is important to find ways to provoke breaking of the rules of the discourse, and to find people who do not obey the rules.

RB: I can vividly imagine what happens when you provoke a discourse, but how do you get to the experiences of people who stick to the discourse in a very obstinate way? How do you man- age to facilitate group discussions where participants start talking about their experience, and do not only use the discursive argu- ments, repeating them time and again? A dialogue with Gabriele Rosenthal 177

GR: When there is a big difference between the discourse and the social reality of collective practices, we find evidence in the social reality, otherwise I would say that the discourse corresponds to the social reality, or more concretely, to the experience of the people. But people are not able to control everything. One of my first experiences in Bethlehem was when I went with a Palestinian colleague into a china shop – it was clear that the owner was a Christian – and we said that we were doing research on Chris- tians and Muslims in Palestine. This topic is taboo, you are not allowed to ask somebody in Palestine if he or she is Christian or Muslim. And then we got a long talk by the owner of the shop about the harmony between both groupings. He explained that he could not tell who was Christian or Muslim, and that he was not interested in that. Then, a man entered the shop, and the shop owner said very quietly to me: «This is a Muslim». If it is really irrelevant whether somebody is Christian or Muslim, then you would not find such incidents in social reality. But if the discourse is covering up something, you will find it when you look for it.

RB: I would like to come back to the question of institution- alisation of biographical research at international level, because you have very strongly shaped this process as an actor, since you were the president of ISA Research Committee 38 «Biography & Society» for eight years, from 2002 to 2010, you have been very active in the German-speaking biographical research area, you have attended almost every world congress of ISA…

GR: Actually, every one, since New Delhi in 1986.

RB: Well, can you just say something about this process of institutionalisation from your experience, what was important in that process, and how do you see the future of biographical re- search in an institutionalised context?

GR: On the one hand, on the international level as well as in the German-speaking countries, we have been very success- ful in that the group is big, and there are a lot of people who are doing biographical research. This is something that has to do with social reality. Especially in societies with profound and fairly fast processes of transformation, people start doing bio- graphical work in their daily lives, or doing it more intensively. 178 Roswitha Breckner and Monica Massari

The problem I see is that we have to think more about the international situation. I am very happy that the new president of ISA Research Committee 38 – Hermilio Santos – is from Brazil, especially in the present situation in Brazil. It needs more intensive work to include people from all parts of the world, or from countries which are marginalised, in our discourses and to support biographical research there. Another thing is what I said at the beginning: it is now time to go back to a stronger dialogue with other parts of sociology. It’s not so easy, but we should make efforts at promoting a more global sociology with more exchanges between the different research areas and sub-disciplines. The main problem in sociology, in Germany as elsewhere, is the segregation into family-sociology, sociology of migration, political or historical sociology, and so on.

RB: The parcelisation of sociology into special sociologies...

GR: I must admit that when I was president of ISA Research Committee 38 – I was elected 2002 in Brisbane, Australia – and we were in South Africa four years later, in 2006, I realised that I had not done enough in order to include sub-Saharan African colleagues in our research committee, and I also realised that the majority of us had not thought about this. So, I hope that Sari Hanafi, the new ISA president, with his Palestinian background, will show more sensitivity in this respect.

RB: While we are talking about the future, what do you think are the pertinent topics that biographical research will have to deal with?

GR: What is going on in our societies and what kind of prognoses we could formulate – based on our empirical research. In my opinion sociology should be a science that does research which gives us insights into ongoing collective conflicts and their possible courses of development or transformation. I will just give a few examples: we need research on topics like experiences of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, to identify components that promote the conflict and others that can help to resolve it. Or research on the personal subjective experiences of people and their motives for supporting right-wing parties in our country, or leaders like Donald Trump, and why others do not accept A dialogue with Gabriele Rosenthal 179 these anti-democratic trends. We need more research – based on the experiences and perspectives of individuals – on collective conflicts, violence and war, and on regions and countries that have less open violence or violent conflicts than others – such as Ghana in Africa, or Jordan in the Middle East. This would perhaps help us to gain better insights into components that reduce conflicts. German sociology, for example, but the same can be said of other countries, is not doing enough research on collective violence, violent collective conflicts and socio-political issues, including in biographical and qualitative research. If social problems are not our business, what is our business? Probably, you wanted more optimistic views…

RB: No, no, just your opinion... When looking at the current issue of «Biography and Society», and in reaction to our call for papers, we got the kind of topics you mentioned as important: we got articles about gender relations, about migration, about doing research in different countries, and we got articles with different methodological approaches. We did not get articles about what I consider a really important topic in society: about social media for example. So, how do you perceive this part of development in society and how could we address this better in the near fu- ture, since this major technological change might also challenge biographical concepts?

GR: May I say something on the contributions to this issue? I think that in Europe there are many young scholars who are working on these topics and, as established sociologists, we are responsible for them, for helping them to find their way into academia and establishing themselves at universities. Regarding social media, as far as I see what is going on, I would say that in the general field of qualitative methods there are more and more projects devoted to them. Including, for example, Facebook and WhatsApp; this topic is coming. An- thropologists and colleagues from communication research have started working on this. Maybe it is also a consequence of the separation between different academic fields which is not fruitful.

RB: So, if I understand you rightly, you would plead for more interdisciplinary cooperation than has already been part of biographical research from the beginning? 180 Roswitha Breckner and Monica Massari

GR: Yes and no. For me, but, as I observe it, also for my PhD students and postdoc colleagues, who are all very involved in biographical research, it is – especially at the University in Goettingen but also in general – much easier to enter into a fruitful and interesting dialogue with anthropologists than with sociologists. So, I feel that we need to establish ourselves better inside sociology. I would also say that it’s important to work with anthropologists and historians, but I miss a better dialogue inside my own discipline. You don’t see this problem inside our discipline?

MM and RB: Yes, actually, very much.

GR: I mean, a discourse which uses the weapon of saying, «What you are doing is not sociology» is a stupid discourse, it’s a kind of power play aimed at defining what is good sociology.

MM: This brings us back to the beginning of our dialogue. When you mentioned that biographical analysis was separated from sociological theory from a certain point on, as if they were two different fields of social theory, well, if you had to choose a few fundamental analytical questions that have been at the core of both social theory and your own research, which ones would you choose?

GR: Regarding theories and their implications for research questions, it is easy to answer: social constructivism and figura- tional sociology.

MM: Could you elaborate on what kind of questions are connected to these grand theories that for you are so crucial? Or to put it in another way, what kind of solutions do these grand theories offer for analytical problems?

GR: The main problem is the interrelation between individual and society, or, more accurately, individuals and societies, and how far experiences and transmitted experiences constitute our social reality. How do we function and how does society func- tion? I mean the basic sociological questions: what is going on? And this «what is going on?» is for me clearly connected with the analysis of its genesis. The question is: how comes that it A dialogue with Gabriele Rosenthal 181 is going on in this way and not in another way? This is why I will not stop doing biographical research because I am strongly convinced that in order to understand a social phenomenon I have to go back to the genesis of it. I mean, we have the chance to speak with at least three generations, and if you ask the first generation about their grandparents, you get information about five generations. In the perspective of Norbert Elias, this is not a very long period, but at least we could do this. In conclusion, I just want to add something which is im- portant to me, regarding the development of sociology: we need more comparative sociology, we need more comparative studies, and we need more knowledge about other societies or regions of the world. And German sociology – but the same can be said of our discipline in other parts of Europe – is so extremely concentrated on its own country. This is really something that we have to overcome, this tendency only to see our own socie- ties, or our own type of national societies.

RB: This is a wonderful closing statement.

MM: Thank you Gabriele for your generosity in giving time for this discussion with us. We hope that this interview will make a useful contribution to the European debate and to the further recognition of biographical methods as a full part of the sociological tradition.

GR: Thank you both for this interview.

REFERENCES

Bertaux, D. (1981) Biography and Society. The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences, London, Sage. Bertaux, D., M. Kohli (1984) The Life Story Approach: a Continental View, in «Annual Review of Sociology», 10, pp. 215-37. Bogner, A., G. Rosenthal (2014) The ‘Untold’ Stories of Outsiders and Their Significance for the Analysis of (Post-) Conflict Figurations. Interviews with Victims of Collective Violence in Northern Uganda (West Nile), in «FQS», 15, 3, Art. 4. Bogner, A., G. Rosenthal (2017a) Rebels in Northern Uganda after their Re- turn to Civilian Life: Between a Strong We-Image and Experiences of 182 Roswitha Breckner and Monica Massari

Isolation and Discrimination, in «Canadian Journal of African Studies», 51, 2, pp. 175-97. Bogner, A., G. Rosenthal (2017b) Biographies – Discourses – Figurations: Meth- odological Considerations from the Perspectives of Social Constructivism and Figurational Sociology, in G. Rosenthal, A. Bogner, eds. (2017), cit., pp. 15-49. Elias, N. (1978) What Is Sociology?, New York, Columbia University Press, (or. ed. 1970). Fischer, W. (1982) Time and Chronic Illness. A Study on the Social Constitution of Temporality, Berkeley, Habilitation Thesis, University of Bielefeld, Faculty of Sociology. Gurwitsch, A. (1964) The Field of Consciousness, Pittsburgh, Duquesne Uni- versity Press. Mannheim, K. (1952) The Problem of Generations, in K., Mannheim, P. Kec- skemeti, eds., Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 276-320, or. ed. 1928. Mitscherlich, A., M. Mitscherlich (1975) The Inability to Mourn, New York, Grove Press (or. ed. 1967). Oevermann, U., T. Allert, E. Konau (1980) Zur Logik der Interpretation von Interviewtexten, in T. Heinze, H. W. Klusemann, H.-G. Soeffner, eds., Interpretationen einer Bildungsgeschichte, Bensheim, PÄD extra, pp. 15-69. Oevermann, U., T. Allert, E. Konau, J. Krambeck (1987) Structures of Meaning and Objective Hermeneutics, in V. Meja, D. Misgeld, N. Stehr, eds., Modern German Sociology, New York, Columbia University Press, pp. 436-47. Rosenthal, G., ed. (1986) Die Hitlerjugend-Generation, Essen, Blaue Eule. Rosenthal, G. (1987) ‘Wenn alles in Scherben fällt...’ Von Leben und Sinnwelt der Kriegsgeneration, Opladen, Leske & Budrich. Rosenthal, G. (1989) May 8th, 1945: The Biographical Meaning of a Historical Event, in «International Journal of Oral History», 10, 3, pp. 183-92. Rosenthal, G. (1993) Reconstruction of Life Stories. Principles of Selection in Generating Stories for Narrative Biographical Interviews, in «Narrative Study of Lives», 1, pp. 59-91. Rosenthal, G. (1995) Erlebte und erzählte Lebensgeschichte: Gestalt und Struktur biographischer Selbstbeschreibungen, Frankfurt am Main, Campus. Rosenthal, G. (2003) The Healing Effects of Storytelling. On the Conditions of Curative Storytelling in the Context of Research and Counseling, in «Qualitative Inquiry», 9, 6, pp. 915-933. Rosenthal, G., ed. (2010) The Holocaust in Three-Generations. Families of Victims and Perpetrators of the Nazi-Regime, Opladen, Barbara Budrich (or. ed. 1997). Rosenthal, G., E. Bahl, A. Worm (2017) Illegalized Migration Courses from the Perspective of Biographical Research and Figurational Sociology: The Land Border Between Spain and Morocco, in G. Rosenthal, A. Bogner, eds., cit., pp. 185-208. Rosenthal, G., A. Bogner, eds. (2017) Biographies in the Global South. Life Stories Embedded in Figurations and Discourses, Frankfurt am Main, Campus. Rosenthal, G. (2018) Interpretative Social Research, Göttingen, University Press (or. ed. 2015). A dialogue with Gabriele Rosenthal 183

Schütze, F. (2008) Biography Analysis on the Empirical Basis of Autobiographi- cal Narratives: How to Analyse Autobiographical Narrative Interviews, in «European Studies on Inequalities and Social Cohesion», 1+2, pp. 153-242, pp. 5-77. Thomas, W.I., F. Znaniecki (1918-1920) The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Monograph of an Immigrant Group, Boston, Richard G. Badger. Wilson, T.P. (1970) Normative and Interpretative Paradigms in Sociology, in J.D. Douglas, eds., Understanding Everyday Life. Toward the Reconstruction of Sociological Knowledge, Chicago, Aldine, pp. 57-79.