Postmemory Trauma

Writing  about  the  Holocaust  means  negotiating  with  silence  and  investigating  the  repercussions of a trauma that never stopped affecting our present. The process of historical recognition  from  the  perspective  of  a  third-generation  artist  implies  the  reconstruction  of the past through objects, photographs and documents, written and visual evidence. Through the analysis of two contemporary German graphic novels – Love  looks  away(2008) by Line Hoven and Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (2018) by Nora Krug – this essay will identify the multiple compositional techniques and aesthetic strategies in order to understand how drawing, text and photography converge in a single effort to untangle History, either micro or macro, in order to understand what came before and after significant historical events – and perhaps even explain why those events occurred.

…The event of the Holocaust is already a horizon which orients our time, certainly in the west, even now, three or four generations afterwards. (Eaglestone 2004: 12) s the final Holocaust survivors pass, the urgent task of representing the atrocity in order to keep its memory alive passes to later generations. However, the ethical imperative for postwar generations to keep memory of the Holocaust alive must compete with vigorous debate about the nature of vicariously claiming connection to this horrific trauma. Accessing the event from a position of generational distance demands new levels of mediation and imagination. Fiction, in particular, has come to be considered a " serious vehicle for thinking about the Holocaust " (Hungerford 2004: 181). Many critics agree that fiction possesses a unique ability to represent the unrepresentable event that is the Holocaust, while also having the power to promote empathy towards traumatic events more broadly: " It is literature that has at least since the Romantics enabled the ethical moment which compels reader response A

Teresa Basile: “La orfandad suspendida: la narrativa de Félix Bruzzone”, en el dossier Formas de la Memoria II, Revista Celehis. Revista del Centro de Letras Hispanoamericanas, Núm. 32 (2016), Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, pp. 141-169.

Resumen: Proponemos analizar, a partir de los relatos reunidos en 76 (2008) y la novela Los topos (2008) de Félix Bruzzone, ciertas marcas peculiares de la infancia huérfana de HIJOS de padres desaparecidos, a través del concepto de orfandad suspendida, en tanto la figura del desaparecido obstruye el proceso del duelo (" duelo prolongado ") y desata la pulsión de la búsqueda y averiguación sobre el destino de los padres. Respecto a las políticas y prácticas de la memoria por parte de la agrupación H.I.J.O.S., Bruzzone ejerce un desvío para explorar las trampas y los riesgos de la búsqueda y de los mandatos de la memoria, desde una escritura atravesada por el humor, el disparate, la incorrección política y la deriva (realismo a la deriva). Su narrativa aborda, además, ciertas secuelas traumáticas que ha dejado la experiencia de la desaparición, tales como el trastorno en los roles parentales y las fisuras filiatorias (la familia rota); la errancia provocada por la pérdida del hogar, las continuas mudanzas y los cambios de manos a los que estaban expuestos los niños (la casa rota); el miedo, la paranoia, la sospecha, el silencio y la incertidumbre que padecieron bajo el terrorismo de Estado (ficción paranoica); y el desacomodo identitario que todo ello generó en el niño (la identidad rota), entre otros efectos.

Suspended orphanage: Félix Bruzzone´s narrative Abstract We analyze certain peculiar traces of the orphan childhood of desaparecidos' HIJOS in the stories of 76 (2008) and in the novel Los Topos (2008) by Féliz Bruzzone. Suspended orphanage is a concept that allows us to examine those traces since the desaparecido impedes the mourning process (prolonged grief) and triggers a pulsion of search and inquiry for the parents " destiny. As regards memory politics and practices within H.I.J.O.S. organization, Bruzzone himself deviates and explore a writing characterized by humor, nonsense, political incorrectness and drift (a drifting realism). His narrative also focuses on the traumatic sequels of the “missing” experience such as parental role disorders and filiation fissures (the broken family); the wander due to home lost, repeated moves and all changes that children had to undergo (the broken home); fear, paranoia, suspicion, silence and uncertainty underwent under State terrorism (paranoid fiction) and the disturbed identity (the broken identity), among other effects that children suffered.

The subject of the following article centers around the issues of migration and postmemory (a term by M. Hirsch), using, as a research material, Mikołaj Grynberg’s "Oskarżam Auschwitz. Opowieści rodzinne" (2014), a collection of narrative interviews with persons brought up by Holocaust survivors. Grynberg’s respondents were born and grew up after Second World War and in Poland, in the USA or in Israel. The authoress analyses selected narrations provided by Grynberg’s respondents and compares how the parents’ decision either to stay in Poland after the war or to migrate to the USA or Israel affected their memories – and via transgenetational transmission of trauma – the
memories and identities of their children. Analyzing "Oskarżam Auschwitz. Opowieści rodzinne" in the context of migration and memory may show how the experiences of representatives of the second generation vary in different social, political and cultural circumstances depending on the place their parents have chosen to live in and may
result in better understanding of the phenomenon of postmemory.

As one of Okinawa's most insightful writers and social critics, Medoruma Shun has highlighted the problems and limits of conventional representation of the Battle of Okinawa, raised new questions and concerns about the nature of Okinawan war memory, and expanded the possibilities of representing war through his groundbreaking and prize-winning fiction, editorials, essays, and speaking engagements. Yet, his writing has not been analyzed in regard to how his experience and identity as the child of two survivors of the Battle of Okinawa have powerfully shaped his understanding of the war and his literary craft.

In the light of Marianne Hirsch's proposition of postmemory in The generation of postmemory: writing and visual culture after the Holocaust (2012) as a generational structure of transmission, Irish Síofra O'Donovan's Malinski (2000) is seen as an ambiguous result of the conjunction of family inheritance of affinity to perpetrators with the rejection towards it. For this analysis work, palimpsest is adopted as a paradigmatic metaphor in the search for traces of negativities under the layers of writing erasures, absences and silences. The construction of meaning through vestiges takes the dynamic of Roland Barthes' punctum (1984), in its potential to inflict and hurt, and also to create a blind field that refers to individual and collective repertoires. The book thus establishes a dialogue with other related texts - novels, images, films - and, serves as an instrument for reflecting on the distortion of contemporary Poland's historical and identity narratives involving the Holocaust and former perpetrators, as well as on the excluded role of bystander, close to a standby position, which even in the early decades of the 21st century contributes to the normalization of violence and increasing moral indifference in societies.

Europe’s architectural ruins and urban blend of past and present are thematised in W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz as both localisers of memory and metaphors of human trauma. Together with the written, archival testimonies, on the one hand, and the unwritten, human memory, on the other, the fictional urban sites depicted in this novel still bear the wounds of war, oppression and genocide. Discovered through a complex process of archeological reconstruction and identification, these public places help reconstruct a harrowing personal story of self-loss and self-discovery.


Jacques Austerlitz is now a professor of architecture, a British citizen plagued - at the end of his career - by the crisis of non-identity. His travels take him around Europe for assiduous research and careful observation of historical ruins and architectural wonders, while he himself is haunted by the eerie feeling of something essential missing from his life. It is when he decides to retrace the train trip back to his native Czech Republic from London (via Germany) that early childhood memories start coming back to him. The map of his estrangement as a child refugee during WWII is now reconstructed step by step, with a double anticlimax in Prague and Paris, two urban spaces still imbued with trauma, where he tracks down elements of his parents’ own story of deportation and death at the Nazis’ hand.


This paper proposes, therefore, to explore the archeology of trauma as a sum of fragmented stories preserved and transmitted by architectural relics as a reassembled whole, one that carries, compliments and sometimes replaces individual memory. Although materially tangible and more reliable than the often elusive human memory, these soulless sites of trauma fail nevertheless to provide that soothing, reassuring element so necessary to closure and human healing.

El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia es la respuesta a sus propias preguntas Al final de El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia, la voz narrativa se pregunta "¿cómo narrar la historia de mis padres?", "¿cómo recordarla?" y "¿qué lugar ocupar en esa historia?" 1 . Estos mismos interrogantes son importantes en numerosas expresiones artísticas de la generación de los llamados 'hijos' argentinos. Sin embargo, en el texto que analizaremos, el narrador literalmente expresa las preguntas en la obra con la cual intenta resolverlas. Este característico, la reflexión metaliteraria, es el hilo conductor que afecta todo El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia, tanto en su contenido como en su forma; que sea el género autobiográfico, el proceso de recordar el pasado o la manera de procesar los traumas del pasado, el narrador no deja de problematizar su propio texto. En lo que sigue, intentaremos explicar cómo se construye la obra de Pron y por qué se expresa de tal forma.

The following article focuses on the analysis of Martin Pollack’s essays in the context of postmemory and the question of after-war generation’s approach towards their parents' past. The authoress introduces selected Pollack’s works that center around the writer’s discovery of his (unknown and barely remembered) father’s Nazi past and describe Pollack’s confrontation with his painful family history. As a member of so-called second generation, Pollack feels a constant connection to the trauma of
war and – as a child of a perpetrator – he feels responsible for the pain that his father caused. The authoress analyses Pollack’s essays (referencing, among others, the studies of Marianne Hirsch, Dori Laub and Erin McGlothlin) showing how his personal story is an inspiration for a debate about the importance of the historical truth and the power of remembering.

The article focuses on the issue of postmemory (a term by M. Hirsch) basing on "Mała Zagłada" (published in 2015) written by Anna Janko, the daughter of TeresaFerenc, who survived the massacre in Sochy (June the 1st 1943). The main objective is not only to present the experience of „the second generation” in the context of the
phenomenon of postmemory, but also to analyze the effect of transmitted memories and trauma on next generation representatives’ identity and narrative. Interpreting the subject of postmemory the authoress provides a theoretical background referencing, among others, the thought of M. Hirsch, E. Sicher and H. Raczymow.

Bien que le lien entre lieux et mémoire soit attendu depuis la publication de l'oeuvre fondatrice Les Lieux de mémoire de Pierre Nora, la prévalence des lieux et des pérégrinations comme clef d'un passé traumatique dans la littérature francophone contemporaine continue à redéfinir la nature même de la mémoire. Les similarités dans la manière dont la fiction francophone propose une contre-mémoire aux narrations officielles de la période d'Occupation en France et de la guerre d'Algérie sont frappantes. L'utilisation de la topographie comme moyen de combler l'incapacité à dire, la transmission du traumatisme, et les réévaluations et réinterprétations nécessaires du eScholarship provides open access, scholarly publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide. passé illustrent certaines discussions théoriques clefs des études mémorielles. Le narrateur du roman de Modiano Dora Bruder remet en question les mémoires de la seconde guerre mondiale à travers la topographie parisienne alors qu'il enquête sur le destin d'une adolescente juive en fugue tout en essayant de recomposer le puzzle de son propre lien généalogique avec le passé collaborationniste de la France. La Seine était rouge est devenu un texte clef au sujet des contre-mémoires de la guerre d'Algérie. Comme celui de Modiano, le roman de Sebbar remet en question le rôle des lieux dans la récupération et la réinterprétation de la mémoire, mais remet également en question le fonctionnement, et échec potentiel, de la postmémoire lorsqu'une rupture communicationnelle existe entre les générations. De plus, le texte de Sebbar introduit le rôle des médias d'une manière qui lie lieux de mémoire, poste-mémoire et mémoire prosthétique. Le roman de Sansal Le Village de l'Allemand ou le journal des frères Schiller créé un lien thématique entre les deux autres romans en cela qu'il traite à la fois de la période de l'Occupation en France et de la guerre d'Algérie. Il est également lié aux deux autres de manière plus théorique, puisqu'il remet également en question les mécanismes de la postmémoire lorsque la communication directe est impossible. Les questions suivantes émergent à la lecture de ces trois romans : Que se passe-t-il lorsque le lien familial de la postmémoire est rompu ? Les lieux peuvent-ils être vecteurs de postmémoire ? Quel est le rôle des prosthétiques dans la postmémoire lorsque le lien naturel n'est plus là ? Comment ces trois romans peuvent-ils nous aider à repenser le concept de la postmémoire en lien avec la postmémoire et la mémoire prosthétique ?

(Part of a collaborative presentation with Alfred Frankowski at the Philosophical Collaborations conference at Southern Illinois University.)

This paper attempts to provide a preliminary sketch of concepts pertaining to a type of traumatic relation to the world for building an idea of post-traumatic architecture. The latter idea is intended to indicate the traumatic significance given to the spatiality of places tied to specific histories, here focusing on the structures of violent racial marginalization and exclusion constructed throughout American history. A characterization of post-traumatic architecture makes it possible to draw a discussion around the differing racial experiences of physical space, such that, for people of color in the U.S. there is an immediate engagement with one’s world that presents it as recalling that very trauma of exclusion, offering a world that says “you are in danger because you are not welcome here,” around every corner. Thus, it is through trauma that world is filtered.

This article explores the enthusiastic reception by gay, lesbian, and mainstream audiences of a German Holocaust document, Erica Fischer’s Aimée & Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943 (1994), in the context of the emergence of increasingly global gay and lesbian movements in the 1990s. Aimée & Jaguar invited collective identification as victims by tapping into the contemporary gay/lesbian discourse that used the Holocaust as a metaphor for the plight of homosexuals, further resonating with a series of AIDS dramas from the era that did the same. The text’s reception and selective (dis)identification by Fischer and audiences alike raise questions about the ownership and appropriation of Holocaust memory as well as about the impact of globalizing social movements and mass media on post-Holocaust identity politics.

Often in immigrant literature, the familial landscape or homeland is considered a traumascape, which as Maria Tumarkin explains, is a place ‘marked by traumatic legacies of violence, suffering and loss’ (2005: 12). For many first-generation immigrants and refugees forced into leaving their homelands, the familial traumascape is also trapped in a past that no longer exists, or exists only in memories that are subject to traumatic ‘visual and sensory triggers’ (Tumarkin 2005: 12). This paper will show how second-generation immigrant writer Alice Pung has used her father’s first-generation trigger memories of place in her memoir Her Father’s Daughter (2011) to direct her own writing. A textual analysis of the father’s present day narrative will reveal details of the traumatic events of an unliveable homeland and the intergenerational impact of this familial traumascape on his daughter. It will also discuss how, at the heart of Her Father’s Daughter, is the Barthesian idea of the punctum and its connection with testimony; and how the father’s homeland or familial landscape becomes the traumatic wounded site of painful trigger memories. Examining the writing from the site of the wound, this paper shows how the father’s traumatised memories of his homeland are able to be transformed as postmemories of place and belonging for the second-generation/daughter in her memoir.

This article discusses how postmemory becomes a liminal space in itself, giving birth to hyphenated identities who oscillate within the realms of this liminality. Liminal spaces are situated in the transformative bisection of the before and the after. Studying the liminal space where true memory is forgotten and a new-fangled postmemory is generated gives an insight into the minds and patterns of the collective subject. Oftentimes, such an act of forgetfulness may be forced upon the collective subject. Governments alter memory narratives, completely erasing or exponentially disfiguring them to meet their agenda. Even the hyphenated collective subject itself indulges in self-imposed forgetfulness to nullify the traumatic experiences it faces, or once faced. It willingly otherizes that which it possesses, consequently romanticizing that which it lacks. During both the Indian partition and the Bangladeshi genocide, millions of refugees flooded into India. Their progenies who grew up in India were treated with promises and visions of a utopian land beyond the borders—a land from which they had had to flee. These second-generation immigrants faced “a dramatic loss of identity and meaning” because of the cultural trauma they encountered through postmemory narratives. Stuck within this chaotic liminal space, they were forced to acknowledge both the romanticized identity that was being imposed upon them and the lacking other that they formed a part of. Narratives of postmemory passed on by the original hyphenated collective subject therefore led to the formation of another hyphenated identity, those forever stuck in a sempiternal liminality.

In the light of Marianne Hirsch's proposition of postmemory in The generation of postmemory: writing and visual culture after the Holocaust (2012) as a generational structure of transmission, Irish Síofra O'Donovan's Malinski (2000) is seen as an ambiguous result of the conjunction of family inheritance of affinity to perpetrators with the rejection towards it. For this analysis work, palimpsest is adopted as a paradigmatic metaphor in the search for traces of negativities under the layers of writing erasures, absences and silences. The construction of meaning through vestiges takes the dynamic of Roland Barthes' punctum (1984), in its potential to inflict and hurt, and also to create a blind field that refers to individual and collective repertoires. The book thus establishes a dialogue with other related texts - novels, images, films - and, serves as an instrument for reflecting on the distortion of contemporary Poland's historical and identity narratives involving the Holocaust and former perpetrators, as well as on the excluded role of bystander, close to a standby position, which even in the early decades of the 21st century contributes to the normalization of violence and increasing moral indifference in societies.

The article contains an analysis of the construction of the narrative of the Shoah, using motifs from the Book of Esther. Non‑fiction book: Code of Esther, 2013 (Le Code d'Esther, 2012), written by French journalists: Bernard Benyamin and Yohan Perez is a record of investigative journalism. During the investigation various interpretations of the "enigmatic" words of Julius Streicher – a Nazi war criminal in the context of the biblical text are recalled. The title of the book and its cover's design predicts sensation while the attractiveness of the communication is achieved by using of multimedia elements (online videos illustrating the described events, accessible through QR codes placed in the book), and an invitation to interact through thematic websites, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. The authors, belonging to the "second generation", derive knowledge and experiences through mediation, which is the reason of the treatment of the book in terms of post‑memory.

Η παρούσα εργασία βασίζεται στο graphic novel του Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale, My Father Bleeds History (Pantheon, 1986) & Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale, and Here My Troubles Began (Pantheon, 1991). Επιχειρείται η σημειωτική προσέγγιση του κόμικς ως αφηγηματικού μέσου αποτύπωσης και παρουσίασης μιας ζοφερής ιστορικής περιόδου. Στόχο της έρευνας συνιστά η μελέτη του τραύματος, της μνήμης του τραύματος, της συλλογικής και πολιτισμικής μνήμης, όπως σκιαγραφούνται και αποτυπώνονται στις σελίδες του graphic novel. Συγκεκριμένα, η έρευνα κινείται γύρω από την ανάλυση της αφήγησης – κατασκευής της μνήμης στο κόμικς, καθώς και τη λειτουργία του κόμικς στο πλαίσιο της πολιτισμικής μνήμης του τραύματος. Ταυτόχρονα προσεγγίζεται η έννοια της μεταμνήμης (postmemory), όρο που εισήγαγε η Marianne Hirsch και τον χρησιμοποίησε για πρώτη φορά σε σχέση με το Maus, αναφερόμενη στους απογόνους των επιζησάντων του Ολοκαυτώματος.


This essay focuses on the analysis of the graphic novel MAUS I: A Survivor’s Tale, My Father Bleeds History (Pantheon, 1986) & MAUS II: A Survivor’s Tale, and Here My Troubles Began (Pantheon, 1991). Using semiotic tools, it approaches comic as a narrative medium through which such a dark page of modern history is presented in Spiegelman’s work. This paper aims to analyze trauma, memory of trauma, collective memory and cultural memory, as they are represented in Spiegelman’s graphic novel. More specifically, the research is conveyed through the concepts of narration – construction of memory in comics, as well as the ways in which the comic appears in the fields of cultural memory of trauma. Moreover, the essay approaches the concept of postmemory, a term introduced by Marianne Hirsch and initially used in regard to Maus and the second generation survivors.

As the final Holocaust survivors pass, the urgent task of representing the atrocity in order to keep its memory alive passes to later generations. In the past ten to fifteen years, the third generation (defined here as the grandchildren of survivors) have begun producing inventive and celebrated works of literature that explore the Holocaust from a unique position of generational distance. While psychoanalytic theory has started examining the impact of inherited trauma on the third generation, there is currently little scholarship on the unique characteristics of third-generation fiction and the position from which it is written. As an author whose Jewish grandfather survived the Holocaust, I would suggest that the ethics of representing the atrocity poses particular challenges and opportunities for the third-generation writer. Authors of this generation face a unique ethical conundrum, I argue, in that they are simultaneously connected to and twice -distanced from the event they se...

Through a critical redefinition of the term ‘postmemory and the introduction of the corresponding term ‘prememory’, two different directions are proposed for advancing the historical study of memory in Ireland and beyond:
Regenerative prememory and postmemory, which broadly surveys cycles of remembrance that range over extended periods of time.
Affective prememory and postmemory, which closely examines deliberations over grassroots construction of memory in a single generation.
These concepts are developed to offer an innovative approach to rethinking social remembrance in Ireland (in the context of the "Decade of Centenaries") and Memory Studies at large.

Past (Im)Perfect Continuous.
Trans-Cultural Articulations of the Postmemory of WWII
June 26-28, 2018
University of Rome, “La Sapienza”

Deadline for accepting proposals for our conference, Past (Im)Perfect Continuous. Trans-Cultural Articulations of the Postmemory of WWII is drawing near... February 28! We look forward to your submissions!

Confirmed keynote speakers include:
• Marianne Hirsch
• Alessandro Portelli
• Anne Roche

See the attached document for CfP and submission details.

This talk contextualizes the late Jewish American artist Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) within Yiddish-speaking immigrant life and American Holocaust memory through close readings of his writing, creative works, and several cultural examples from his youth in the 1930s and '40s, including the Yiddish children's periodical "The Kinder Zhurnal." It mobilizes theory from trauma and memory studies to trace how Sendak channeled the marginalized sensibilities and emotional rhythms of a Holocaust-marked adolescence into creative battlegrounds for challenging wider American conceptions of childhood.

Deadline for accepting proposals for our conference, Past (Im)Perfect Continuous. Trans-Cultural Articulations of the Postmemory of WWII is drawing near... February 28! We look forward to your submissions!

Confirmed keynote speakers include:
• Marianne Hirsch
• Alessandro Portelli
• Anne Roche

See the attachment for CfP and submission details.

Past (Im)Perfect Continuous.
Trans-Cultural Articulations of the Postmemory of WWII
June 26-28, 2018
University of Rome, “La Sapienza”

After their forced exile from Algeria in 1962 the European inhabitants of Algeria were met with a cold reception in the Métropole. Originally applied to them as a pejorative, the term Pied-Noir was soon adopted with pride, in turn granting them the status of a single people with a shared history despite the fact that in Algeria they had been a diverse group, with internal divisions drawn across class, religious and ethnic lines. Textual and visual production was instrumental to the forging of this new community. Of particular importance are what Amy Hubbell has called photodocumentaries. One of the most famous examples of which is the audaciously titled Les Pieds-Noirs, by Marie Cardinal. The anachronism of this book’s title is clue to its motive; not any attempt at recreating colonial Algeria as it was, but, in Hubbell’s words, “as it needs to be seen today”, that is, as a tool to galvanize the Pied-Noir community in France around a belief in common adversity and a longing for the land they were forced to leave.
In the graphic novel d’Algérie, published in 2007, Morvandiau provides a critique of the role of photodocumentary texts in the maintenance of the Pied-Noir collective memory. This paper will examine how Morvandiau harnesses the representational power of comics in order to do so, whilst arguing that his concerns with the past are in fact equally as guided by the present; in his case the political legacy of the Pied-Noir collective memory in France.

Artykuł koncentruje się na analizie zagadnienia postpamięci (termin M. Hirsch) na podstawie materiałów (wywiadów narracyjnych z osobami wychowanymi przez ocalałych z Holokaustu) zgromadzonych przez Mikołaja Grynberga w zbiorze Oskarżam Auschwitz. Opowieści rodzinne (wyd. 2014). Celami tekstu są ukazanie i próba zinterpretowania doświadczeń „generacji po” w kontekście zjawiska międzypokoleniowej transmisji wspomnień oraz zwrócenie uwagi na destrukcyjne mechanizmy i konsekwencje pospamięci. Poszukując odpowiedzi na pytanie o wpływ traumy wojennej na tożsamość tych, którzy ją przeżyli, oraz tych, którzy odziedziczyli ją w postaci postpamięci, autorka odwołuje się między innymi do myśli M. Hirsch, H. Raczymowa i E. Sichera.