The starting point of the doctoral project Minnesrörelser (Movements of Memory) is a documentary material, based on interviews, archival documents, letters, diaries and more, from Germany and Sweden from the 1930's to present time, focusing on childhood, upbringing, eugenics, bilingualism. The family as a place for historical writing, family stories inevitably connected with political history, and how they can be passed on or kept secret makes up the main subject matter, where questions of memory and postmemory, heritage and transgenerational consequences of terror, war and guilt, as well as the role of silence, speaking and translation, are investigated. The way the project has developed and come to a preliminary end, that is, this dissertation, is in itself a story, an open end narrative, where the roles of the author and the reader are focused on. The well-known statement by Roland Barthes that "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author" is used an impulse, along with Novalis' view on reading and writing as an ever continuing literary dissemination process.