The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust by Marianne Hirsch (review)

In the course of the last twenty-five years, memory has replaced identity and ideology as the most prominent analytical category in the humanities and social sciences. In scholarly and popular discourses, the occupation with memory has, as Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche described it, almost amounted to an “obsession.”¹ At the same time, proponents of memory studies have developed increasingly sophisticated concepts and approaches, further reflecting the ongoing skepticism toward conventional historical narratives.

The work of Marianne Hirsch, who holds a chair in comparative literature and gender studies at Columbia University, exemplifies the field’s increasing sophistication. Hirsch is best known for the conceptualization of postmemory, which she first introduced in the early 1990s and developed further in subsequent studies such as Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (1997) and Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010).² Her latest book, The Generation of Postmemory, brings together seven previously published but reworked readings, two new essays, and an insightful introduction. In this volume, Hirsch conceptualizes postmemory as a “structure of inter- and transgenerational return of traumatic knowledge and embodied experience” (6). The concept captures the connections of the “generation after” to the “personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before.” Mediated by imaginative investment and projection, members of this younger generation “remember” the older generation’s experiences that appear as “memories in their own right” (5). Hirsch develops these conceptualizations in her analysis of second-generation authors and visual artists whose parents had been persecuted during the Holocaust. For the author, as a child of Romanian-Jewish survivors born in early postwar Bucharest, these readings are also always autobiographical, and she repeatedly identifies herself as a member of the “postgeneration” (4).

The volume tackles fundamental questions of the study of postmemory. In addition to situating the transmission of trauma across generations in the “intimate embodied space of the family,” Hirsch proposes to show how these transactions involve “adoptive witnesses” and “affiliative contemporaries” outside the family structure (6). The volume also seeks to explain what institutional and aesthetic technologies mediate the transmission of trauma and why visual media, in particular photography, has become so influential in these processes. Hirsch consistently roots her approach in feminist theorizations that are particularly central to her proposition to develop postmemory work as a cultural and political intervention that constitutes a “form of repair” (22).

The essays of the collection’s first part tackle the workings of familial post-memory. They turn to narrative fiction and visual artwork by second-generation Holocaust survivors that date from the mid-1980s to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Hirsch discusses both the immensely influential graphic novel Maus, by Art Spiegelman, and W. G. Sebald’s widely discussed novel Austerlitz as key examples of postmemory in which familial tropes function as central mechanisms of memorial transmission. Drawing himself in a concentration camp uniform, Spiegelman, Hirsch argues, indicates “his complete transposition into his parents’ history” and “incorporation of their trauma in Auschwitz” (43). Moreover, both works highlight the prominent role of the mother, exemplifying, for example, “maternal abandonment” as a paradigmatic trope for the postgeneration’s aesthetic and psychology (30). In ensuing chapters, Hirsch’s readings take a more autobiographical turn. In “What’s Wrong with This Picture?,” coauthored by Hirsch and her partner, historian Leo Spitzer, the authors demonstrate how an analog photograph of Hirsch’s parents taken in 1942 Czernowitz operates as a “point of memory” and instrument of transmitting the parents’ trauma (61). Hirsch, meanwhile, moves decidedly beyond language and photography and also situates a “bodily mark” at the center of transgenerational trauma transmissions. Her analysis of artists’ books by Tatana Kellner that unfold around caring images of tattooed arms presents daughters as the primary “agents of transmission” who endorse a “reparative ethical and political act of solidarity” and help with the trauma of others (99).

The book’s second part moves...