In this article, we scrutinise epistemic competitions in interviews about World War II. In particular, we analyse how the interlocutors draw on their epistemic authority concerning WWII to construct their interactional telling rights. On the one hand, the analyses illustrate how the interviewers rely on their historical expert status – as evidenced through their specialist knowledge and ventriloquisation of vicarious WWII narratives – in order to topicalise certain master narratives and thereby attempt to project particular identities upon the interviewees. On the other hand, the interviewees derive their epistemic authority from their first-hand experience as Jewish Holocaust survivors, on which they draw in order to counter these story projections, whilst constructing a more distinct self-positioning to protect their nuanced personal identity work. Overall, these epistemic competitions not only shaped the interviewees’ identity work, but they also made the link between storytelling and the social context more tangible as they brought – typically rather elusive – master narratives to the surface.

在本文中，我们在有关第二次世界大战的采访中仔细研究了认知竞赛。特别是，我们分析了对话者如何利用他们对第二次世界大战的认知权威来构建他们的互动话语权。一方面，分析说明了访调员如何依靠其历史专家地位（通过他们对二战的替代叙事的专业知识和风俗化证明），以使某些主要叙事成为主题，从而尝试将特定的身份投射到受访者身上。另一方面，受访者从作为犹太大屠杀幸存者的第一手经验中获得了认识上的权威，他们以此为依据来反驳这些故事的推测，同时建立更独特的自我定位，以保护他们细微的个人身份识别工作。总体而言，这些认知竞赛不仅影响了受访者的身份识别工作，而且还使故事叙述和社会环境之间的联系更加明显，因为它们将通常是难以捉摸的大师级叙事浮出水面。