Paper short abstract

Using autoethnography, this paper analyses how silences around Nazism and Francoism are produced through everyday family routines and interactional norms. It shows how emotional discipline and gendered hierarchies shape moral memory, subjectivity, and intergenerational polarization.

Paper long abstract

This paper uses autoethnography to analyse how family secrets and silences structure emotional expression, moral memory, and intergenerational polarization in a German–Spanish family shaped by the afterlives of Nazism and Francoism. The focus is not on silence as an absence of speech, but on silence as a social practice and normative order that regulates what can be named, felt, and processed.

Empirically, the paper draws on selected autobiographical episodes that reveal the micro-politics of silence: routinised forms of control and accountability, the management of conflict through avoidance, the displacement of tension into humour, and the gendered distribution of care and responsibility. These practices produced an “emotional regime” in which fear, guilt, shame, and anger were present but rarely articulated, while parental authority and gendered power relations were stabilised through implicit expectations rather than explicit discussion.

The paper mobilises perspectives from affect theory, feminist anthropology, and memory studies to conceptualise silence as an embodied archive and a moral infrastructure through which authoritarian histories persist in family life. It argues that intergenerational transmission operates not only through narrative content (what is told or withheld), but through habitualised interactional forms that shape subjectivity and capacity for recognition.

Finally, the paper reflects on methodological and ethical implications of autoethnographic disclosure. Making the unsaid analytically visible may enable recognition and dialogue, yet it also entails risks of relational harm and renewed conflict. The paper contributes to debates on secrecy, affect, ethics, and the potential and limits of anthropology in engaging familial histories in polarised contexts.