The close-up of Alessandro Mendini’s Poltrona Di Proust (1978) on the cover of this book shows the upholstery pattern of the artist’s huge chair. Mendini wanted to emphasize that reality is comprised of ‘an endless collection of memoires and fragments’. It struck me as a fitting motto for this book, in which I want to merge various memories and fragments of life stories into a meaningful whole.
After the publication of Heimat in Holland. Duitse dienstmeisjes 1920–1950 (1995) about the way National Socialism affected the life stories of German-Dutch women in the Netherlands, I continued my research into national and political identifications by looking at the political entanglements of folklore studies (Uit liefde voor het volk. Volkskundigen op zoek naar de Nederlandse identiteit 1918–1948 (2005). The transnational research by Dutch, Flemish, and German scholars for a ('greater') Dutch or Germanic identity after the First World War took me once again into the realm of National Socialism.
After so many years of these painful histories and sometimes nasty historiographical debates, I wanted to get away from National Socialism and what in my eyes was an unproductive distinction between perpetrators, victims and so-called bystanders. I decided to focus on Dutch migrants settling in postwar South Africa. This choice, however, shows once again my abiding interest in the various policies of inclusion and exclusion by national governments and the dynamic subject positions implying acceptance, legitimation, denial, resistance, and often a combination of these in the face of violent repression. This time I focussed on Dutch migrants' postcolonial gazes, their loyalties and responsibilities at the intersection of Dutch and South African political and social networks.
In Negotiating Racial Politics in the Family I bring together the continuing use and meaning of egodocuments and oral history for all of my research, as well as the different geopolitical spaces and times that have informed my work. The ‘kick-off’ for this book was an invitation by Rudolf Dekker to talk about the significance of egodocuments in my research at the Auto/Biography Seminar of the Huizinga Institute, the Dutch national Research Institute and Graduate School of Cultural History. Afterwards Dekker suggested turning my presentation into a book for his Egodocuments and History Series with Brill Publishers. Crucial for the reworking of earlier publications in combination with new work was my introduction to the concepts of ‘touching tales’ and ‘multidirectional memory’. This helped me to connect the histories of racial inclusion and exclusion in different times and spaces. Besides, the notion of the ‘implicated
I would like here to acknowledge the importance of interdisciplinary networks and their coordinators, such as the aforementioned Auto/Biography Seminar, the network Unhinging the National Framework coordinated by Babs Boter, and the Oral History Group of the Huizinga Institute, initiated by Selma Leydesdorff. And not to forget the inspiring meetings over the years of the now defunct history workshop Andere Tijden (Other Times). These regular gatherings remain a welcome addition to the feedback students give me in my courses at the University of Groningen, and the exchanges with colleagues during national and international conferences or symposia. Many more exchanges have contributed to the making of this book, not least my encounters with the main protagonists of this book and their relatives in the Netherlands, Germany and South Africa. They gave me access to private documents and shared their personal memories, for which I cannot thank them enough. ‘Doing family’ in this book also means 'doing history', and vice versa.
Although friends or colleagues are not generally referred to as ‘family’, there are parallels, for example when an ad-hoc group of valued historians gathered around my dining table to comment on earlier stages of my drafts Mieke Aerts, Martijn Eickhoff, Remco Ensel, Marijke Huisman, Vincent Kuitenbrouwer and Susan Legêne all read the first draft of the Introduction and a chapter each. Thanks to their input these have since been radically changed. Tanny Dobbelaar later organized a meeting with Leonieke Vermeer and Fleur van der Bij to help me get to grips with the overall argument of the book. In addition to the anonymous referees with their constructive comments, Mieke Aerts and Martijn Eickhoff once more offered critical support in the final phase. Richard Johnson and Timothy Ashplant provided my English translations with both stylistic and substantive comments, so that Ineke Smit could finally dot the i's and cross the t's. Any remaining errors are of course my own responsibility. Finally, I want to thank Victor van Bentem for transcribing the handwritten letters that formed the basic source material for chapters four and five, and Sidney Groeneveld for his indispensable technical and moral support.
This book is dedicated to Erwin Karel (1956-2019), my sparring partner from the start of my intellectual trajectory.