Second-Generation Testimony, Transmission of Trauma, and Postmemory

Abstract

In discussions of second-and third-generation Holocaust literature and testimony, it is an accepted idea that the trauma of Holocaust survivors is often transmitted from the first to the second and later generations. This article analyzes the ''problems'' of survivors' children in order to see if they can be understood by reference to the trauma of the parents. This will be done on the basis of literary testimonies, namely, Eva Hoffman's After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust and Carl Friedman's Nightfather.

Video Testimony, Modernity, and the Claims of Melancholia

“…The main dangers involved are processes of secondary traumatization, in which, in Ernst van Alphen"s words, a factual "lack of memories and a lack of continuity" register as a "vertigo … in which suffering takes the place of inheritance." 35 The ghostliness that characterizes this vertigo of nonidentity may tempt people toward exclusionary and identitarian forms of embodiment, which brings on the threat of a repetition of the catastrophe that video testimony seeks to mediate into a promise of transcultural community. For Hartman, video testimony, as well as other aesthetic mediations of the Holocaust, must firmly embody the ghosts that trauma generates in a way that prevents such a vertigo of nonidentity.…”

Introduction: Photographic Interventions

“…Another central term of photography studies in general, and of photography in literature more specifically, is the concept of "postmemory," which refers to the photograph's function in the intergenerational transfer of memory (Hirsch 1997(Hirsch , 1999(Hirsch , 2001Liss 1991Liss , 1998Long 2003Long , 2006Hoffman 2004;van Alphen 2004). In an essay especially written for this collection, "The Generation of Postmemory," Marianne Hirsch defends the concept against some of the criticisms that have been leveled against it and considers the role of photography for fictional memory transfers.…”

(Re)Building, (Re)Creating and (Re)Imagining: Postmemory Representations of Family Through the Eyes of Rafael Goldchain and Art Spiegelman

“…(p. 103) The term postmemory is a word inundated with meaning. Marianne Hirsch breaks the term into its two core constituents: "post" and "memory," with greater focus on the prefix (Alphen, 2006). Hirsch notes the prefix of "post" is not an implication of the second or third generation's inability to form memories of the Shoah.…”

“…Because both memory and postmemory are mediated forms of a reality, one relative difference is used to differentiate the two. The differentiating factor is time: memory is a direct link to the past (Alphen, 2006). Those who experience the phenomenon of postmemory, however, are temporally displaced from the memory itself, as they were born years after the event.…”