The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust

Gender and Culture Series

by Marianne Hirsch

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Holocaust, Theory, Academic, Art, Social

305 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 26, 2012

About the author

Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Co-Director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference, at Columbia University. She is the author of Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, among other books. Leo Spitzer is Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History Emeritus at Dartmouth College, and the author of many books, most recently Hotel Bolivia: A Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism."

Reviews

[chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marianne Hirsch eres perfecta

[J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5 - 4 stars; 4 stars for Hirsch's postmemory project: This was immensely readable/remarkably not dry for an academic text. Though I agree with another reviewer in that the inclusion of gender/feminist theory fell a little flat for me after the introduction: it does indeed employ a hetero/cis binary (particularly with her examination of mother/child; feminized/hyper-masculinized elements in surviving photography). However, if one keeps in mind it was a relatively early book/working out of Hirsch's postmemory, then it is a comprehensive launch in postmemorial studies. I'm eager for a follow-up, particularly in terms of the image/the archive and digitization.

[Lily]

unfortunately i skimmed this bc i'm currently a very busy student and so i feel weird saying i read this but anyway very interesting stuff

[Sophie Nguyen]

me when the subjects i’m studying are actually incredibly well written and interesting to read 💔

[Gwyneth Owen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Idgaf I am gonna log the reading I do for my thesis! This was really impressive and really quite readable. Hirsch brings such intimacy and personal investment to this work. As a result, it reads as a kind of academic memoire instead of bone-dry monograph.

[Ethan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fascinating work of scholarship on a deeply relevant topic!

[Corey James Soper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional analysis of the concept post-memory which significantly expands on the scope of Hirsch's original article to other histories. Necessary for anyone whose work touches on memory.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really solid exploration of memory work across generations.

[KleineAphraBehn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can one person remember another person’s memories? Can an experience be so horrifying and disturbing that the generation which follows inherits its memory as if they witnessed such a trauma themselves? In The Generation of Postmemory, Marianne Hirsch introduces the term “postmemory”, arguing that yes, in a way, the impact of war, genocides, and other catastrophes characterizing the greater part of the twentieth century is so enormous that descendants of survivors are deeply affected by it. Although they have not lived through those difficult times, the weight of past traumatic events and the previous generation’s remembrance burdens the next generation to such a degree that they feel as though they did; they feel a connection strong enough that it can be referred to as memory. However, what the second generation perceives as memories ultimately are still knowledge, images, and recollections which have been transmitted to them. The memories that they receive need to be distinguished from those of contemporary witnesses, victims, and participants. That is why Hirsch insists on the prefix post - to emphasize a generational act of transfer; aftereffects of a trauma are so visible and powerful that they are passed on to those born after the tragedy. As Hirsch states, postmemory basically “describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences that they ‘remember’ only by means of […] stories, images, and behaviors.” Postmemory thus is a phenomenon that defines the complex relation that develops between the succeeding generation and the traumatic experiences of the generation before, experiences that, for example, children of survivors of the Holocaust discover only through the anecdotal and rudimentary narrations of their parents – and yet then carry like their own real memories. Unlike real memories though, “[p]ostmemory’s connection to the past is […] not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation.” Postmemory is not identical to memory – for it is something that one did not experience directly –, but the tales and behavioral patterns that children of Holocaust survivors grow up with still appear to contain the same overwhelming pain and power of actual memories.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had much higher hopes for this book although I found some rather useful stuff in it. But its attempts at "queering" anything (as it gestures towards in the introduction) are pretty weak while its brief theorizing about "affiliative postmemory" bears perhaps the most productive, if underdeveloped, opening for a queer anything in this book. This text is as heteronormative as they come unfortunately, relying on reproductive futurism and biological family at the core of its theorizing while never addressing family of choice, queer families, queer kinship, hetero biological families as sites of violence and trauma, or what queer intergenerational trauma and postmemory might look like (the AIDS crisis in the US as genocide, or at least malicious structured abandonment, would be a starting place for a conversation here...). Due to this, it's baffling why there is a pull quote on the back cover from Halberstam. Or maybe not...

[Natalie Newell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to read this essay for a class, but I'm so glad I did! I enjoyed it immensely.

[Zoe · Rating 4 out of 5]

eye opening and thoughtful