2022: Anna Burger – a Fate (un)like that of many Others. The Persecution of so called ‘Asocials’, and Family Memory

Nobody was deservedly in the concentration camp, concentration camp imprisonment was wrong per se – Even almost 80 years after liberation from the National Socialist camps, this insight is gaining acceptance far too slowly. Especially with regard to those who were persecuted as 'criminals' or 'asocial', this view is by no means self-evident. In order to anchor this knowledge in the middle of society, the portrayal of individual fates is necessary to make the injustice comprehensible. The research project on Anna Burger's biography makes this possible. It shows how quickly someone could get caught up in the National Socialist machinery of persecution, how relentlessly the legal and social norms in force at the time were implemented, how tragically a life classified as worthless could end: Anna Burger was murdered by lethal injection in Ravensbrück concentration camp in December 1943 at the age of 30.

How do her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren deal with such a fate in their family? Do they know about Anna's life and death and if so, what do they know specifically? Do they even want to know? And beyond that: To what extent do they establish a relationship between their own lives and Anna's experiences of persecution under National Socialism?

The project documents the life and early death of a woman branded as 'asocial' under National Socialism. It links the individual fate of Anna Burger and its traces in the generational memory with the scientific findings on the persecution of women and men stigmatized as 'asocial' and on the transgenerational transmission of trauma.

The book based on this project is available (in German) in bookstores or via Mandelbaum Verlag.

Brigitte Halbmayr: Brüchiges Schweigen. Tod in Ravensbrück – auf den Spuren von Anna Burger. (Fragile silence. Death in Ravensbrück – in the footsteps of Anna Burger.) Wien – Berlin: Mandelbaum 2023