The Generation of Postmemory

Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust

Marianne Hirsch

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780231526272
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Can we remember other people's memories? The Generation of Postmemory argues we can: that memories of traumatic events live on to mark the lives of those who were not there to experience them. Children of survivors and their contemporaries inherit catastrophic histories not through direct recollection but through haunting postmemories—multiply mediated images, objects, stories, behaviors, and affects passed down within the family and the culture at large.

In these new and revised critical readings of the literary and visual legacies of the Holocaust and other, related sites of memory, Marianne Hirsch builds on her influential concept of postmemory. The book's chapters, two of which were written collaboratively with the historian Leo Spitzer, engage the work of postgeneration artists and writers such as Art Spiegelman, W.G. Sebald, Eva Hoffman, Tatana Kellner, Muriel Hasbun, Anne Karpff, Lily Brett, Lorie Novak, David Levinthal, Nancy Spero and Susan Meiselas. Grappling with the ethics of empathy and identification, these artists attempt to forge a creative postmemorial aesthetic that reanimates the past without appropriating it. In her analyses of their fractured texts, Hirsch locates the roots of the familial and affiliative practices of postmemory in feminism and other movements for social change. Using feminist critical strategies to connect past and present, words and images, and memory and gender, she brings the entangled strands of disparate traumatic histories into more intimate contact. With more than fifty illustrations, her text enables a multifaceted encounter with foundational and cutting edge theories in memory, trauma, gender, and visual culture, eliciting a new understanding of history and our place in it.

INDEX

Page numbers refer to the print edition but are hyperlinked to the appropriate location in the e-book.

Abraham, Nicolas, 82, 255n13

absent memory, 3

acts of return, 24, 203–25; body and sense memory triggered by, 211–13; sequels to, 224–25; surrogations in, 213–16; visual returns as, 216–21

acts of transfer, 31. See also intergenerational acts of transfer; transgenerational acts of transfer

affiliative postmemory, defined, 36, 40, 41, 42, 48, 97, 109, 122, 161, 180

affiliative structures of transmission: in child victim images, 155–74; and cultural acts of affiliation, 159; in familial postmemory, 22, 23, 98–99; figures as, 113–20; in Fink’s “Traces,” 109–12; in iconic images, 103–24; and identification, 166; in Levinthal’s Mein Kampf, 145–49; in mother/daughter transmissions, 93; in Novak’s Night and Fog, 122–24; in perpetrator images, 127–52; screens as, 120–22; in Spero’s The Torture of Women, 149–52; in testimonial objects, 177–200

After Such Knowledge (Hoffman), 1, 3. See also Hoffman, Eva

“After Such Knowledge: Culture and Ideology in Twentieth-Century Europe” (course), 10

Agosín, Marjorie, 156, 161–62, 165

Aka Kurdistan (Meiselas), 240–41, 242, 246

albums: as archives of postmemory, 228, 230–33; evidentiary power of, 65; limits of, 237–43; as transitional period creations, 232–33

allo-identification, 85, 87, 90, 97, 98

alterity, 166, 172–73

alternative histories, 15–16, 243–47

Améry, Jean, 44

And I Still See Their Faces: Images of Polish Jews (Tencer & Bikont), 102, 226, 229, 230–35, 237–43

Anfal campaign (1988), 231

archives of postmemory, 24, 227–49; albums as, 230–33; alternative histories and counter-memories in, 243–47; digital archives, 228, 230, 242; gaps and silences in, 24...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Introduction
• I. Familial Postmemories and Beyond
• II. Affiliation, Gender, and Generation
• III. Connective Histories
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Series List