Post-Memory and Marianne Hirsch Marianne Hirsch Discusses

Post-Memory and Marianne Hirsch Marianne Hirsch discusses an important concept in Holocaust/Memory studies, post-memory. What kind of experience/process does post-memory refer to? Why did Hirsch need to invent such a concept? What is the importance of memory, family, and photography in order to understand post-memory? Marianne Hirsch introduces the concept of "post-memory" in her 1992 essay Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory.

According to Hirsch, post-memory "is the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that they 'remember' only as the stories and images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right….secondary or second-generation memory…." (1992). Post-memory is based on the recollections of the storyteller rather than the lived experience of the listener (Tal, 1996).

Hirsch came to this understanding as a result of her own childhood experiences of absorbing the Holocaust memories and emotions of her parents. She did not witness or experience the traumatic events personally, but for her the affect was just as real as what her parents endured. This is post-memory in action. Hirsch dissects post-memory into two primary views - heteropathic and idiopathic identification (1992). Heteropathic post-memory is sympathy felt at a distance. It involves conflicting thoughts of "it could have been me" and "but it wasn't me" (Goertz, 1998).

Idiopathic post-memory is the active involvement in traumatic experience through feelings of sympathy. For example, throughout much of Hirsch's work she shares her own and other people's postmemories by showing pictures and retelling stories. In her essay Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy she shares a photo by Lorie Novak of the children of Izieu. There is an image of a mom holding her baby right before they were executed. Hirsch sees herself in this photo as the crying child held by the mother.

The mother can sense the impending danger and their inescapable fate. This created for Hirsch an idiopathic post-memory because it is something she saw as a youth that had a very traumatic effect and produced a memory that she came to own personally. Her feelings of empathy transported her to that particular place and time and she "lived" the memory on a very personal level. Other concepts associated with post-memory include studium, punctum, and projection (Hirsch, 1992). Studium is seeing something distressing but familiar, similar to heteropathic post-memory.

Punctum, on the other hand, is when a post-memory produces a jarring effect. It is seeing or experiencing something totally unfamiliar that creates a very personal frustration or emotional wound. Goertz (1998) describes it as "the element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me." Projection is akin to idiopathic post-memory, producing powerful feelings of connection and transporting the observer into a different time and place.

Hirsch explains that collective memory encompasses many facets of experience - past and present, adult and child, self and other (1992). There is no singular viewpoint that supersedes another and no two individuals incorporate post-memory into their lived experiences the same (Hensley, 2012). She theorizes that representation is an aesthetic quality in which one can attempt to manifest the intangible (emotion) into the tangible (lived experience). The purpose of representation is to replicate a thought and emotion into another person's mind.

As humans we attempt to represent thoughts and emotions constantly in order to reach mutual understandings with one another (Tal, 1996). This is commonplace and completely conscious to our minds. Post-memory takes it one step further and looks at how trauma impacts this process through a psychological and physiological lens. The complexity of traumatic damage on the brain isolates the traumatic event to the unconscious mind -- it is not incorporated into the body the same way a non-traumatic event would be (Tal, 1996).

Trauma is a psychological response brought forth by a clear violation of one's own mental representations of the world due to an extremely horrifying event (Hirsch, 1992). Given its extreme nature, one cannot possibly perceive the event in its presented representation due to personal expectations of what constitutes "normal" in the world. Typically, the traumatic event falls outside the scope of the possible for the traumatized victim whose worldly representations vary due to personal background such as cultural, racial and social distinctions (Hensley, 2012).

To look at it another way, trauma violates and offends our sense of "this sort of thing happens in the world, but it will never happen to me" (Tal, 1996). The event falls into the realm of the impossible or unimaginable. As humans, we find it difficult to translate the impression of the event onto the conscious mind. Yet the actual experience does remain in the mind unassimilated in its entirety (Goertz, 1998).

The trauma then lies dormant within the subconscious mind, instead of allowing the mind to be plagued by it constantly. The mind will desensitize in the face of any dehumanizing observation to allow its mental capacities to move on (Hirsch, 1992). Based on this, Hirsch believes that without the theory of post-memory, traumatic experiences within cultural groups would be lost forever within the minds of the actual survivors - made latent due to the complexity and ferociousness of the pain endured (1992). They would never expand to the future generations.

Family narrative, memory, and photography allow for a secondary witnessing of traumatic events such as the Holocaust, and are essential for this reason. Secondary witnessing is an attempt to transfer the effect of trauma into a third observer and close the gap between viewers and subjects (Hensley, 2012). This is the purpose of museums and other forms of memorialization. Hirsch's theory of post-memory focuses on the internal features of trauma, not the externalized effect.

She attempts to take the complex inner psychic dynamics of Holocaust-related traumatic damage and to turn it into a new ethical relationship of empathy and identification (Goertz, 1998). Her work raises such questions as: "what does it mean to adopt another's trauma, how can one do so, will it only cause more suffering and pain to the receiver?" Granted, there is always the risk of causing further damage to the audience than the traumatic experience originally caused its primary actors (Hensley, 2012). This is one critical analysis.