The present volume is an extended new edition of my habilitation thesis from 1993, published by Campus Verlag in 1995. This thesis and my writings relating to biographical research based on it, some of which have been published in several languages, are recognized as important contributions to sociological biographical research both in the German-speaking world and internationally. A new German edition of this book1, and also an English edition, have been a concern of mine for some time. This concern is justified by its continuing importance both for my own work – empirical research projects, which I have always carried out together with colleagues – and for many of the research projects I have supervised, mostly in the context of doctoral or other theses. This research continues to be based on the conception presented at that time of a dialectical relationship between experiencing, remembering, and narrating or, more generally, speaking about the experienced and handed-down past. The investigation of this relationship, combined with an increasing focus on the interactions between it and the collective memories of diverse groupings in respect of events and activities in different historical phases, as well as their effects in the present, runs as a central theme through my later work (Rosenthal 2016a). For example, I am currently co-leading a research project with Maria Pohn-Lauggas on slavery and the slave trade in individual and collective memories in Brazil and Ghana.2 An essential concern of this research, in addition to reconstructing current patterns of action and interpretation or discourses, is to investigate their genesis. This means that we always have to ask to what extent speaking about the past is based on memories of what has been experienced (which also includes the experience of transmitting the past by the older generations), and to what extent this gives us clues to what was experienced at the time. While this question is at the forefront in this book, the later methodological modifications – that is, the increasing use of other methods of data collection – are due to an effort to reconstruct, to a greater extent than before, discourses that prevailed at different times and present patterns of activity. I will return to this later.

Until 1995, my empirical and theoretical research was focused on the social and individual consequences of the collective crimes committed during National Socialism. Even after that, it has been largely focused on the thematic field of collective violence and its consequences (see Bogner 2021). With Artur Bogner, I conducted research on extremely traumatized “child soldiers” of the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Northern Uganda who had returned to civilian life (Bogner/Rosenthal 2020).3 Thus, I was still confronted with the question of the extent to which narrated life stories are determined by the components of a memory damaged by traumatization in the context of macro-violence (see chapter 4.1.4), by the discourses prevailing at different times, which often deny violence, and by the frequent outsider position of victims of collective violence. When interviewing victims of collective violence, we social scientists are particularly challenged to support the interviewees in the process of remembering and narrating. In addition, it is necessary to decipher the differences between the present perspective and the perspectives of the interviewees at different times in the past when analyzing or evaluating the interviews. This is a challenge that is all the more important in biographical interviews with (former) participants in violent crime, who often try hard to deny their involvement or to omit this topic and the corresponding phases of their life as far as possible, or even try to invent a different biography (cf. Rosenthal 2001, 2002).

However, when we conduct interviews with people, or use their written biographical self-testimonies, regardless of which groupings they belong to, we are always confronted with the problem that we cannot draw direct conclusions from texts about the behavior and action patterns of the speakers or writers, let alone about what they experienced in the past.

The methodological implications of the basic conception of mutual interaction between remembering, experiencing, and the presentation of experiences, as discussed in this volume, as well as the method of biographical case reconstruction which I propose (see chapter 6.2), continue to inform my conception of a fruitful research design. This is primarily due to the need for historically grounded social research that seeks to understand and explain social phenomena in their processes of emergence, reproduction, and change. This involves reconstructing the collective and biographical trajectories that led to particular behavior or actions, to particular ways of remembering, and to the establishment of particular discourses. For about twenty years now, especially as a result of my collaboration with Artur Bogner, I have integrated into my work theoretical and methodological approaches from figurational sociology, partly because of my increasing interest in the methods of historical sociology, but mainly because of my growing awareness of the constantly changing balances and inequalities of power that are operative in all human relationships. The assumption of the constant presence of power balances and power inequalities presupposes an at least partially “structural” concept of power, as discussed by Norbert Elias, but also, for example, by Max Weber or Richard M. Emerson (cf. Bogner 1989: 36-41; 1986; 1992). In Weber, power is the “chance” one has for a certain form of action, and thus does not per se imply the corresponding form of intention or its active realization or passive perception.

With a greater interest in the perspective of figurational sociology, the focus on individual interviewees which the present volume might suggest – although this was by no means intended at the time – shifted to a more strongly applied focus on we-groups, and other, less clearly networked or integrated groupings of people, which is more clearly laid down in the research design. I began to focus increasingly on reconstructing the interconnectedness of individual cases, the figurations between different groupings, we-groups, and organizations, and, concomitantly, the changing power balances and power inequalities between the various groupings over the course of history.4 Many of the research projects I have supervised take into account the additional perspective of figurational sociology. To explain this development toward a synthesis of social-constructivist and figurational biographical research, the present edition concludes with a chapter co-authored with Artur Bogner (see also Bogner/Rosenthal 2022).

Parallel to developing a more figurational perspective, my methodological approach changed significantly as a result of my field experiences in the “Global South”. These taught me to combine biographical case reconstruction – which always remained at the center of my work – even more strongly with other interpretive or reconstructive methods. I began to follow more consistently the principle of openness (cf. Rosenthal 2018: chapter 2), not only in terms of modifying the original research question or sample, but above all in terms of increased flexibility in the planned use and combination of methods of data collection. It should not go unmentioned here that my own research planning, the use of certain methods, and the resulting experiences have also been shaped by quite a few of the dissertations I have supervised. It will not be possible for me to go into all these research projects in this context, but I can say that they have all been based on the method of biographical case reconstruction presented in this volume. However, at least some of them should be mentioned. An explicit combination of social-constructivist biographical research with discourse analysis in the tradition of Michel Foucault and of the sociology of knowledge was first carried out by Bettina Völter (2000; 2003; Schäfer/Völter 2005) in the research project “The Holocaust in the Lives of Three Generations”, described below.5 As in the other works cited, Völter’s case analyses, which refer to the case level of both the individual biography and the family, are characterized by a careful reconstruction of family history and...