JOHANN HEINRICH CARL – THE REVOLUTIONARY: THE HISTORY AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY OF A GERMAN-AMERICAN FAMILY, 1852-2004

In 2004 the North America Letter Collection (Nordamerika-Briefsammlung) received an extraordinary letter series consisting of 202 letters written by 19 different authors, all members of a large transatlantic family network (Bohn family). They wrote to each other beginning in the mid-19th century after four out of five children had immigrated to the United States. Letters were written to family members in Germany and between family members in the United States settling in different places. Drawing on this unique collection as well as on two volume family history written by the American amateur historian in 1982 and interviews with family members conducted in 2004 and 2006, the paper reconstructs the memory of transatlantic family, spanning the life experience of seven generations. The analysis sheds light on how history and memory are intertwined. It also demonstrates that Bohm family’s history and identity is the outcome of the interplay of the social construction of individual memories and its continuous reproduction in the form of stories told and histories written as a means of creating family cohesiveness in a very diverse and spatially scattered and thus separated social environment