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.)

  

Trauma

Trauma occurs when an experience or event is so strong, that it escapes understanding because it doesn’t fit into any known frame of reference (both symbolic and empirical). When an event ‘makes no sense’ it can’t really be remembered, understood or even truly experienced. Without concrete frames of reference that give cognitive distance a person constantly reenacts the event, repeats it in direct experience. When the human psyche tries to process a traumatic event it will endlessly replay it, struggling to find meaning, or resolution through the replay. In this sense re-visits it rather then remembers. This visitation has nothing to do with memory, whereas memory needs distance, separation from actuality in order to re-present the event, trauma melts reality with representation, diminishes all the differences between them – the event becomes the representation or in the words -although used in an entirely different context – of Norman Bryson: The representation absorbs the house. This is explicitly evident for example in Cambodia’s Genocide Museum where the excavation and uncovering of the history of the Khmer Rouge Regime was done simultaneous with showing it, as the museum opened for the public only three months after its discovery.

Alain Resnais, “Hiroshima mon amour”

Based on the novel by Marguerite Duras, it is a romantic drama about a young French actress appearing in an anti-war film in the rubble and reconstruction of the city of Hiroshima. She quickly begins a brief unstable affair with a Japanese architect. The affair brings to light the political and cultural tensions that underlie even their most personal experiences and memories. The film made groundbreaking use of then innovative flashbacks to explore her repressed memories of a German lover killed in World War II and the subsequent humiliation and captivity imposed on her by her family. This movie was a great success for Resnais, garnering him international fame and cementing his place in French cinema history.