Persecution and participation through the lens of cultural family history

Drawing on the personal documents of the author's great–grandparents, Annemarie (1884–1968) and Heinrich Brenzinger (1879–1960), this article makes the case for a history of the Holocaust that accounts for the complexity of everyday life in the Nazi dictatorship. It approaches the Brenzingers' family archive as an open-ended repository of meanings to investigate the social and political fabric of the Third Reich. Introducing cultural family history as a productive methodology for elucidating the subjective and relational dimensions of individual responses to the Nazi regime, the article argues that persecution and participation in the Third Reich were culturally contingent, socially inseparable dynamics.