Silence and Memories of War: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Family Secrecy

A personal journey and a scientific challenge, this is an autoethnographic study about my own family's secrecy. I knew my grandfather had been a German prisoner of war during World War II. We all knew. But nobody talked about it. Then one day I decided I wanted to do systematic research on the issue of family secrecy around my grandfather's war experiences. Researching one's own family can be called autoethnography. It could be said that autoethnography is an approach to research that aims to describe and systemically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) to understand social and cultural phenomena (ethno). This scientific approach is quite new in the field of family therapy. This study has been an important personal quest, but it also led to important reflections on silences in families, on my own professional development, and on methodological issues concerning autoethnographical research. For one thing, it highlights some of the positive aspects of family secrecy and silences, and invites us-when confronted with family secrecy in clinical practice-to carefully consider the potential destructive and life-giving aspects of the silence.