Figurations of Postmemory: An Introduction

When Memories Precede Our Birth

When, in December 2014, the French writer Patrick Modiano was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, he was presented with a quote from one of his own books, the still untranslated into English Livret de famille from 1977, which elusively summarizes a lifelong obsession of his:

I was only twenty years old, but my memory preceded my birth. I was convinced, for instance, of having lived in Paris during the Occupation, for I could recall certain characters from that period, along with minor disquieting details not mentioned in any history book. Yet I tried to battle the weight that dragged me backwards and dreamed of freeing myself of a poisoned memory. I would have given anything to become amnesiac.¹

Born in 1945 in Paris, Modiano had no firsthand experience of the war years, nor had he lost any relatives to the events of the era. His mother, a Flemish actress, had translated subtitles for the Nazi-established film company Continental Films, while his father, a shadowy character of Greek-Jewish origin, had managed to escape deportation and subsisted during the war period by trading on the black market. The dysfunctional couple soon ditched their son, who grew up in a grim, second-tier boarding school. Although Modiano attempted to circumvent his own origins—for a long time, he claimed to have been born in 1947, as if those two years could protect him from the all-too-symbolic moment of caesura his own actual birth year represented—the “obscure night” preceding his existence kept haunting him. The years of the Occupation seemed more real than the present, he asserted; they were the time when “chance meetings happened between people whose paths never would have crossed during peace time,” ultimately also producing the fortuitous encounter between his parents, like “lost butterflies” thrown together in a storm.²

The case of Patrick Modiano is by no means an exception in the twentieth century. Quite the contrary. Experiences of violence, loss, and trauma, which seem to be the distinctive blueprint of an extreme century, were not restricted to particular victims but extend far beyond, in space as well as time, sometimes weighing heavily on later generations. “To grow up with overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s consciousness,” Marianne Hirsch observes, “is to risk having one’s own life stories displaced, even evacuated, by our ancestors. It is to be shaped, however indirectly, by traumatic fragments of events that still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension. These events happened in the past, but their effects continue in the present.”³

Postmemory: Familial, Affiliative, Connective

To conceptualize this often described but as such nameless phenomenon whereby someone is strongly marked by distressing events that preceded that person’s own birth and inhabits them as if they were private recollections, Marianne Hirsch has coined the notion of “postmemory,” which has had a large scholarly echo since its inception in the early 1990s. In a Freudian view, a traumatic memory is a memory of events that, because of their harrowing, overwhelming nature, cannot fit into an individual’s functioning sequential memory; the memory of the trauma “acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work.”⁴ Against the backdrop of this view of trauma with respect to the individual psyche, the development of a notion like “postmemory” can be seen as symptomatic of a general movement within memory studies that tends to grant memory an inter-individual, social dimension. Since mourning has been denied to the survivors, these traumatic memories that have not been worked through are handed down to the subsequent generation, thus turning postmemory into the result of an entire generational remove (recall the Mitscherliches’ famous thesis about the “inability to mourn”).⁵

While postmemory initially referred to the common experience of the “second generation” of Holocaust survivors—the notion was firstly developed by Marianne Hirsch in an...