Die Vergangenheit wiedererzählen : Berichte vom Migrationsverlauf der zweiten Generation deutschsprachiger Migranten nach Palästina/Israel

People retell events for different purposes, both in written and oral situations, thus being able to recontextualize and reinterpret a story that has already been told (cf. Schiffrin 2003, 2006; Schumann/Gülich/Lucius-Hoene/Pfänder 2015). The major contribution to the study of retellings from both a linguistic and a psychological perspective has come from investigating laboratory free recalls (cf. Marsh 2007). Despite the growing interest in this field current research on this topic has focused on a limited range of retelling contexts (cf. Gülich/Lucius-Hoene 2015; Scheidt/Lucius-Hoene 2015); furthermore, there has been little discussion of conversational retellings. This paper aims at bridging this gap. In an attempt to explore what happens when the same episodes are presented and re-told after a certain period of time, in 2019 I decided to take new interviews in Israel with selected second generation Jewish German-speaking migrants to Palestine/Israel, who were first interviewed almost 15 years ago by Anne Betten as part of the Israel Corpus project (see e.g. Betten 2016). My goal is to show that retellings are creative processes. The narrative changes and linguistic shifts resulting from the teller’s retrieving and story(re)telling in the new speaking context will be discussed by presenting a qualitative analysis of retellings of episodes in separate interviews taken with the same interviewees.