Missing the "Real" Trace of Trauma: How the Second Generation Remember the Holocaust

For some little time now I have been collecting the testimonies of children of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Australia. What preoccupies me particularly has been to see how psychoanalysis, specifically its Lacanian orientation, could be used to work on a key problematic which has been opened up in the historical work on the Shoah, as a consequence of its engagement with the memories of those who were its witnesses. In one notable articulation of this problematic, Saul Friedländer asked: "The question remains [. . .] whether at the collective level . . . an event such as the Shoah may, after all the survivors have disappeared, leave traces of a deep memory beyond individual recall, which will defy any attempts to give it meaning" (Friedlander 1992, in Young 1997, 49). James E. Young, in an essay honouring Friedländer's work, contemplates how one might fashion a form of history-telling about the Shoah that could "give meaning" to such traces of the "unremembered" of survivor memory, yet without falling into redemptive forms of representation. Although, Young reflects, we will probably only be left with the second generation's artistic and literary representations of these traces once its survivors have died, he sees one solution to the current problem of how to "includ[e] some oblique reference to such deep memory . . . which leaves it essentially intact" in the kind of uncanny doubling as survivor and historian practised by Friedländer. In Friedländer's historical work we can hear, according to Young, "the uncanny middle voice of one who is in history and who tells it simultaneously, one who lives in history as well as through its telling" (emphasis in original, Young 1997, 49-50, 53).

This paper takes off from these concerns and their suggested solution. It proposes that the position of being in history, of being in a position thereby to "remember" and to testify to the truth of the Shoah should not be restricted to the category of those who "directly experienced" it as historical event. For the uncanny middle voice, which in Young's mind preserves something of the unrepresentableness of an event such as the Shoah, can also be heard in the "life-stories" of those who experienced the Shoah indirectly, as children growing up with parents who were its survivors. My paper proposes that we should not confine our understanding of this second generation's story-telling to the notion of "representation," be that artistic or literary, with its implication of necessary failure to give meaning to the memory-traces left by the Shoah. For within the "fictions" of representation produced in the oral and written testimonies of the second generation, a kernel of "real" ¹ and unassimilated "deep memory" sometimes makes its appearance. It is this, I believe, which connects the memories of growing up that are told by children of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Australia, a place as geographically distant from the Shoah as one could find, to the traumatic "memories" of a European event which their parents also, we could say, did and did not experience directly. It is also this, I believe, which entitles their testimonies to be thought of as a kind of witnessing of the Shoah. ² As an historian who collects such testimonies, the uncanny truth about "the past" in the speech of the second generation is, moreover, the effect of a complex and dialectical operation: unconscious testimony ³ by the children of survivors concerning memories of events not directly witnessed by them, transmitted to an historian-cum-analyst (myself), also a child of survivors with unexperienced memories from elsewhere who, in speaking to you today bears witness to these memories of, shall we say, the Shoah.

Why do this? Like many others, although it has taken me quite some time to submit to it, I was deeply moved by Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. What affected me most of all was the sight of...