Postmemorial Autobiography in Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

Scholarship on written Holocaust accounts deals extensively with problems of witnessing, but primarily assumes that the writer is a survivor. Yet, literature relating to the Holocaust has also been written by nonsurvivors. The immense scholarship on written Holocaust survivor accounts, viewed in relation to autobiography, demonstrates the rise of a new type of autobiography in the context of Holocaust Studies: postmemorial autobiography. With the term postmemorial autobiography, I draw on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” and relate it to autobiography. In The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006), Daniel Mendelsohn adapts the genre of written survivor accounts and incorporates it into his own autobiography. Both an autobiography about himself and his relationship to his family, and a memoir about his six “lost” relatives, The Lost explores whether or not someone who was not there to witness can nevertheless function as a witness. This article examines the narrative strategies, more specifically, the interplay between text and image, or between narrative and photography, that Mendelsohn employs throughout his autobiography. Mendelsohn’s postmemorial autobiography, by layering oral testimony with Mendelsohn’s own memories, functions as a palimpsest and these layers are themselves reflected in the combination of photography and narrative.