Investigating Re-Elaborations and Re-Evaluations in Oral History Interviews Through Retellings

One of the core peculiarities of the oral history approach is the link between its dominant narrative dimension and the recount of both subjective and historical events (Portelli 1981, 1998). Oral history narratives may well include story pieces that have already been told before (Portelli 1998), yet in a different communicative setting and to a different audience. It follows that they may be considered unreliable sources (Schiffrin 2001). This issue is particularly relevant in the investigation of retellings, by means of which the speaker has the possibility to re-verbalize and reinterpret a story that has been already told before (Schiffrin 2003, Schumann et al. 2015). The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of retellings for the sake of analyzing oral histories. To illustrate this, I compare passages taken from multiple interviews with two second generation German-speaking migrants to the Land of Israel. The interviews were conducted within the framework of the long-term Israel Korpus project (e.g. Betten 2010, 2014; see corpus ISZ, IDS Mannheim: http://agd.ids-mannheim.de/korpus_index.shtml; OHD project no. 266). Given that “oral history is about the historical significance of personal experience on the one hand, and the personal impact of historical matters on the other” (Portelli 2005), I show that different layers of identity emerge in retold stories. With reference to the changes in evaluation of past experiences and past selves in retellings, I discuss their positive impact on interpreting and researching into oral history narratives.