This introduction argues that the field of memory studies needs to pay more attention to the role of joyful and positive types of memory. Quoting recent discussions, we propose that the dominant focus on traumatic and dark pasts within memory studies carries the risks that the research field ignores important aspects of collective memory and eclipses group memories that differ from societies' hegemonic discourse about the past. Contemporary societies also need positive or hopeful memories in order to create alternative imaginaries for the future. This special issue sets out to explore what memories of joy may look like and how they can be studied.

Since ancient times, diaspora has been intrinsically connected to Judaism. Whereas modernization and emancipation at the end of the nineteenth century had promised to end the principal rootlessness of Europe’s Jewish population, the rise of Nazism once again set them back into a diasporic and extraterritorial state. According to Marianne Hirsch, descendants of exiled Holocaust survivors unwillingly inherit their parents’ continued dislocation. As the homeland of their ancestors has ‘ceased to exist’, they are destined to remain forever exiled from the ‘space of identity’, even if they choose to return to the former homeland of their parents. According to Hirsch, the expression of this ongoing diaspora gives rise to a special narrative genre that is governed by photographic aesthetics. The authors’ imaginative completion of their parents’ experiences in the work of postmemory imitates the capacity of photography to simultaneously make present and ‘signal absence and loss’. This article will differentiate Hirsch’s approach to artistic representations of diaspora in the aftermath of the Holocaust. By outlining different conceptualizations of diaspora, I will show that in addition to the aesthetics of photography the postmemory of homelessness can also be expressed by means of nostalgic aesthetics and transcultural aesthetics. The article exemplifies all three of these types of aesthetics by investigating works by the contemporary Jewish writers David Mendelsohn, Anna Mitgutsch and Barbara Honigmann. Whereas Hirsch’s photographic aesthetics represents the melancholic insight that a return to the place of origin is impossible, nostalgic aesthetics gives in to the very desire for a ‘final return’ (Hall 1990). Both the nostalgic and the photographic aesthetics intrinsically connect identity to a distinct location and cultural belonging, which the writers attempt to restore through the work of postmemory. Transcultural aesthetics, on the other hand, expresses the interconnection of different places and cultures that arises from living in diaspora. This article concentrates on the transcultural aesthetics exemplified in the autofictional writings of Barbara Honigmann. By voluntarily going into exile, Honigmann refrains from staying attached to a distinct space and from the attempt to assemble her fragmentary knowledge about her parents’ past with regard to an imaginary homeland.

Memory is not only a biological capability but also a social practice of constructing the past, which is carried out by social communities (e.g., the nation state, the family, and the church). Since the 1980s, memory studies has intertwined the concept of cultural memory with national narratives of the past that are to legitimize the connection between state, territory, and people. In the present time of growing migratory movements, memory studies has abandoned this “methodological nationalism” and turned its attention towards dynamic constructions of cultural memory. Indeed, memories cross national and cultural borderlines in various ways. The cultural memory of the Jewish people, ever since its beginning, has been defined by mobility. As the exile and forty years of wandering in the wilderness preceded the Conquest of Canaan and the building of the temple, the cultural memory of the Jewish people has always been based on the principle of extraterritoriality. The caesura of the Holocaust altered this ancient form of mobility into a superimposed rediasporization of the assimilated Jews that turned the eternal longing for Jerusalem into a secularized longing for the fatherland. This article presents examples of German-Jewish literature that is concerned with the intersection between the original diaspora memory, rediasporization and longing for a return to the fatherland. I will analyze literary writings by Barbara Honigmann and Vladimir Verlib that in a paradigmatic manner navigate between memory of the Holocaust, exile and the mythological past of Judaism, and negotiate the question of belonging to diverse territorial and mobile mnemonic communities.

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