Marianne Hirsch

The Generation of Postmemory

Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to power- ful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were never- theless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Focusing on the remembrance of the Holocaust, this essay elucidates the generation of postmemory and its reliance on photography as a primary medium of transgenerational transmission of trauma. Identifying tropes that most potently mobilize the work of postmemory, it examines the role of the family as a space of transmission and the function of gender as an idiom of remembrance. The guardianship of the Holocaust is being passed on to us. The second genera- tion is the hinge generation in which received, transferred knowledge of events is being transmuted into history, or into myth. It is also the generation in which we can think about certain questions arising from the Shoah with a sense of living

Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory

“One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany. For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau that I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July . Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life— ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about.What good was served by seeing them? They were only photographs—of an event I had scarcely heard of and could do nothing to affect, of suffering I could hardly imagine and could do nothing to relieve. When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead, something is still crying.”1

Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction

T he cover image for this volume, “Self Portrait (Ellis Island),” evokes several of the issues and assumptions suggested by the relationship between cultural memory and gender. Produced in 1988 by the U.S. photographer Lorie Novak, the image is a projection: a photograph of a slide of a woman’s face floating in an empty room with peeling plaster walls, an open door, and a rough earthen floor. The woman’s head is bifurcated at the point where floor and wall meet. The face fades into the doorway and the hall behind it; the color of her skin merges into the earthen tones of the floor; the dark curly hair disappears into the ceiling. Pushed back to the two sides of the room, the carpet becomes an asymmetrical décolletage, creating the illusion that the room and her chest are one and that to walk into the room is to have access to the interiority of the person. The caption tells us that this is a self-portrait: the head is a photograph of the photographer. Although in the image the self of the portrait mysteriously hovers in space, the title firmly situates her in a particular place, Ellis Island, where generations of immigrants and refugees from Europe first entered the United States. “Self Portrait (Ellis Island)”—the two terms are parenthetically related, as though Ellis Island qualifies the notion of “self,” or of “portrait.” The image is at once a portrait of Ellis Island and a self-portrait in Ellis Island. The relationship among these terms is as ambiguous as the situation of the artist’s body and head in the space she does not quite inhabit: she is both photographer and subject of the image, both behind the lens and in front of it, both in the Ellis Island space and elsewhere. The image is

The witness in the archive: Holocaust Studies/ Memory Studies

What has Holocaust Studies brought to the study of memory, and, conversely, how has theoretical work on the Holocaust been inflected by Memory Studies? Focusing on witness testimony, we argue that the theoretical and philosophical efforts to grasp and define its contours have provoked a radical rethinking of the workings of memory and transmission: in particular, a foregrounding of embodiment, affect and silence. Yet we caution against a hyperbolic emphasis on trauma and the breakdown of speech. We find that the very aporias that have made the Holocaust a touchstone for the study of twentieth-century memory have engendered two distinctive interpretive uses of witness testimony — one linked to a troubling idiom of uniqueness and exceptionalism, potentially supporting nationalist and identity politics, the other, to cosmopolitan or transnational memory cultures able to sustain efforts towards the global attainment of human rights.

Editor’s Column: Collateral Damage

IN AN INTERVIEW FOLLOWING HIS 7 MAY 2004 TESTIMONY to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Donald Rumsfeld, the United States secretary of defense, admitted knowing about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison since they were first exposed in January. He also knew of the existence of photographs documenting the abuses, but he had not studied the images until shortly before they were shown to the public during the first week of May. In asserting that “[i]t is the photographs that give one the vivid realization of what actually took place” and that “[w]ords don’t do it,” Rumsfeld expressed, and even surpassed, one of the prime clichés of our time, that a picture is worth a thousand words. Before the power of visual images, the subject has an uncontrollable emotional response: “you cannot help but be outraged.” No wonder, then, that images from the Iraq war have been so strictly controlled by the government; no wonder that their revelation—whether they are images of coffins, of wounded soldiers, of scenes of torture perpetrated by or against Americans—has been so explosive. General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, even went so far as to ask CBS’s Sixty Minutes II to delay showing the photographs of prison abuse to the public lest their dissemination do harm to the troops abroad, and throughout May and June of this year pictures from Abu Ghraib were printed and distributed slowly and with an unusual degree of cautionary 1 1 9 . 5 ]

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

This article considers the important role of archival photographs in the work of historians, artists and writers of the generation after the Holocaust. Powerful “points of memory” linking past and present, memory and postmemory, individual remembrance and cultural recall, photographs can offer evidence of past crimes and function as haunting specters that enable an affective visceral connection to the past. And yet, photographs may also be limited and flawed historical documents, promising more than they can actually reveal. The article argues that such ambiguous evidence may be a resource for historians seeking to grasp and transmit the pasts emotional truth.

First-Person Plural

Yes, it’s true. Not only did we collaborate on a book, but we have also written articles together, co-taught courses and seminars, and, on many occasions, we’ve presented papers and given joint public talks. But it is our collaborative writing and publication of a lengthy book that elicits the raised eyebrows and incredulous chuckles. Although research scientists often work together in teams and publish papers signed by multiple authors as a matter of course, academic collaboration in the humanities, and especially interdisciplinary collaboration resulting in published work, is still viewed by many as sufficiently unusual to merit commentary. And collaborative writing and publication by a married academic couple occurs so seldom that it continues to generate astonishment and wonder.

The Cernăuţi Ghetto, the Deportations, and the Decent Mayor

The zeal with which Romanian authorities began deporting Jews in the summer of 1941 into German-occupied territories in the Ukraine, without express orders or requests from the Nazis, has become legendary. Unprepared for the masses of deportees, the Germans sent thousands of them back to Bessarabia and Bukovina, and even blocked several bridges on the Dniester to stop the floods that were streaming in from the Bessarabian region of the country. “German National Socialism was schooled in Romania!” wrote Dr. Nathan Getzler in his wartime diary of Cernăuţi1 and Transnistria (Getzler 1962, 55). The Romanian Fascist newspaper Porunca Vremii presented the Romanian efforts to get rid of Jews as a model to the rest of Europe as early as the summer 1941: “The die has been cast… The liquidation of the Jews in Romania has entered a final, decisive phase… To the joy of our emancipation must be added the pride of [pioneering] the solution to the Jewish problem in Europe… Present-day Romania is prefiguring the decisions to be made by the Europe of tomorrow” (Quoted in Ioanid 2000, 122, 123).