Erste Überlegungen zum Verhältnis zwischen Gedächtnis und Mehrsprachigkeit in narrativen Interviews mit Kindern des Kindertransports

Memory represents a research topic that has been explored in a wide variety of disciplines. Especially interesting is the interplay between autobiographical memory and narration of a ‘life story’, since both are closely linked to the construction and reconstruction of the self. In the case of multilingual speakers, this constellation is enhanced by the language factor, i.e. the language of encoding and the retrieval context language for mnemonic traces. On the basis of the linguistic biography of a speaker from the FEGB – Flucht und Emigration nach Großbritannien (Flight and Emigration to Great Britain) corpus, who emigrated from Munich to Great Britain in 1939 thanks to the operation known as Kindertransport, the present contribution focuses on the analysis of code-switching as a tool to explore the relationship between autobiographical memory and narration. The complex scenario that emerges reveals that code-switching goes beyond the linguistic level and is embedded in a broader discursive dimension in which, among others, the past dimension of the storytelling practice and the thematization of childhood memories are aligned with the language of encoding.