Memory studies: theory, practice, and interdisciplinary perspectives

¶ … Home Examination

Culture

Marianne Hirsch discusses an important concept in Holocaust/Memory studies, postmemory. What kind of experience/process does postmemory refer to? Why did Hirsch need to invent such a concept? What is the importance of memory, family, and photography in order to understand postmemory?

Postmemory is a concept that Marianne Hirsch developed as part of memory studies. She contends that memory is something that can be passed on to others, particularly passed on to others in the generation that follows the tragic event, and in this case her focus in the Holocaust, though she explains that her theories can be applied to other events. Early on in her article she succinctly describes the term and the concept of postmemory.

Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. (Page 103)

Sometimes events are so powerful that the memory of the event goes beyond those who were there and lived through the experience. The concept of postmemory offers insight to the power and potential of memory. She explores the idea of having memories that are both one's own and at the same time not one's own, such as the memories of the Holocaust.

Hirsch's idea of postmemory comes from both her professional and personal experiences. She came upon the idea during her own personal research. She additionally explains how the term postmemory is a part of the canon of all things or movements that are "post" and the prefix post is significant for her with regard to the relationship among time, memory, and disruption.

Postmemory is the term I came to on the basis of my autobiographical readings of works by second generation writers and visual artists. The post in postmemory signals more than a temporal delay and more than a location in an aftermath. Postmodern, for example, inscribes both a critical distance and a profound interrelation with the modern; postcolonial does not mean the end of the colonial but its troubling continuity, though, in contrast, postfeminist has been used to mark a sequel to feminism. We certainly are, still, in the era of posts, which continue to proliferate: post-secular, post-human, postcolony, post-white. (Page 106)

Postmemory is not static; it is in flux. Postmemory also has the ability to exist in the past, present, and the future. Postmemory constitutes the link between time and experience. Like many great thinkers over time, she came upon this term or idea by accident, while focusing upon another subject. She noticed patterns of transmission between generations; she noticed how the transmission of the memories of horrifying or tragic events such as the Holocaust. These patterns led Hirsch to conceptualize memory in a new way that had not previously been conceptualized or articulated.

Postmemory shares the layering of these other posts and their belatedness, aligning itself with the practice of citation and mediation that characterize them, marking a particular end-of-century/turn-of-century moment of looking backward rather than ahead and of defining the present in relation to a troubled past rather than initiating new paradigms…it reflects an uneasy oscillation between continuity and rupture…postmemory is not a movement, method, or idea; [it is] a structure of inter- and trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience. It is a consequence of traumatic recall...

This is yet another example of writing where one of Hirsch's underlying suppositions is that memory is alive in some way. Memory has a life of its own and it has so much life that it can infuse itself into those who were not even a part of the event. The term post for her is a symbol and a connection between the generations. Postmemory is a way to connect multiple generations. Postmemory is also another form of memory and embodiment.

Hirsch argues that postmemory can be another form of trauma, yet she also has hope that postmemory could have the potential for positivity such as healing, therapy, activism and resistance. She states that postmemory has the potential to harm the secondary generations. Postmemory for them could be a form of violence or aggression. Just as much as those who lived through the trauma are victims, so too are those who have the postmemory of the trauma.

But these experiences were transmitted to [progeny] so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Postmemory's connection to the past is thus not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation. To grow up with such overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one's birth or one's consciousness, is to risk having one's own stories and experiences displaced, even evacuated, by those of a previous generation. It is to be shaped, however indirectly, by traumatic events that still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension. These events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present. This is, I believe, the experience of postmemory and the process of its generation. (Page 111)