“The Supreme Function(s) of Life”: Love, Longing, and Grief in Postwar Encounter Narratives

Abstract This article examines how Jewish survivor-military couples observed, recognized, displayed, and rationalized emotions in their wartime and postwar testimonies. It focuses on the specific spatial and social locations of so-called emotion clusters, namely, the moments of encounter when survivors and military personnel first met. The military personnel and their survivor spouses each underwent experiences of death and destruction that they would absorb into stories about how they met. When describing their first meetings, the women and men studied here invoked love, affection, joy, longing, hope, horror, and grief, and, in so doing, they shaped and scripted their lives. Their stories offered clues to how they made sense of their nuanced, messy presents, and later, their complicated pasts.