Post-Memory

Marianne Hirsch describes post-memory as the relationship of the children of those who survived or witnessed cultural and collective trauma, to the experiences of their parents. These experiences transmitted through stories or images, where so strong, so monumental, that they conjured up there own memories:

“Post-memory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through projection, investment, and creation. It describes the relationship of the second generation to the first – their curiosity and desire, as well as their ambivalence about wanting to own this knowledge.” (M. Hirsch and L. Spitzer, War Stories: Witnessing in Retrospect, in: Image and Remembrance. Representation and the Holocaust, ed. S. Hornstein and F. Jacobowitz, Indiana University Press 2003, p. 139.)

 

Secondary trauma

Geoffrey Hartman on the other hand supposes that direct and extremely realistic representations cause desensitization in the viewer, or as Robert Lifton writes: ‘psychic numbing’. “Terrible things, by continuing to be shown, begin to appear matter-of-fact, a natural rather than man-made catastrophe.” (See:  G. H. Hartman, Public Memory and Its Discontents, in: “Raritan” 14, 1994)

Comparable to an earthquake or tornado attack. The human element is taken out, therefore the possibility to hold others responsible for these acts is put into question. Moreover transmission of information about historical events such as Holocaust or other genocides doesn’t lead to conscious remembrance or healing of wounds, but secondary trauma, which is the result of representing the Holocaust, wars and other massive violations of human rights in modes that are themselves traumatizing. Ernst van Alphen, writes:

“Modes of representation capable of causing secondary trauma are those which seek to overwhelm the viewer with naked imagery: docudramas, the journalistic image and reports that attempt to expose the ‘bare truth’ or ‘naked facts’ – in short, those realistic modes that strive to convey historical truth. [...] It’s a paradoxical and ultimately hopeless endeavor to counter traumatic effects by using traumatic modes of representation, because a foreground effect has to be apprehended intellectually to be acted upon. In this case, the viewer is too overwhelmed to arrive at such a response.” (E. van Alphen, Caught by History. Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art. Literature and Theory, Stanford University Press 1997, p. 165-66.)

  

Art Spiegelman, “Maus”

 

Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale. My Father Bleeds History, New York: Pantheon, 1986.

Art Spiegelman, Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale. And Here My Troubles Began, New York: Pantheon, 1991.

 

References:

James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.

Jean Amery, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.

Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.

Saul Friedlander, (ed.) Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.

Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, New York: Harper, 1984.

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