The personal history of individuals during the World War II and post-war period is looked at through the film texts "Deutschland, bleiche Mutter", "Europa, Europa", "Peppermint Frieden" and "The Ties That Bind". These film texts are considered for the way in which the filmmakers, in autobiographical accounts of their own lives or of the main characters, have explored and recreated history through individual memory. Memories of childhood in Nazi Germany are constructed from personal remembrance and experience to form a memory of the individual that is unaccounted for in the standard institutional history.