Das Gespenst der Vergangenheit:

Abstract

Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma Central to the following article is the question of the transgenerational transmission of collective trauma. It is about "postmemory" - the memory of children of victims and perpetrators or children of parents, who were either from a nation or ethnic group involved in war or genocide or who suffered from war or genocide. The article deals with the transgenerational trauma of the Holocaust, which affected the children of victims as well as the children of perpetrators, although each in radically different ways. The transgenerational trauma of these children is placed in the context of other histories of violence such as colonialism, slavery, the persecution of dissidents during dictatorships (for example, in Chile under Pinochet) and apartheid. In "postmemory", experience is always mediated through representation. But traumatic representation is characterized by a paradox: the unspeakable must by all means be expressed. For this reason the paradox of traumatic representation is given considerable attention in this article. The article uses the notions of "crypt" and "phantom", developed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, and their method of "cryptonymy" or "cryptonymic reading" in order better to understand this paradox and to show ways in which the unspeakable can indirectly be expressed and worked through. In this context, collective screen memories play an important role. They can conceal and split off unbearable and unspeakable experiences or historical events. However, under certain circumstances, the displacement of the unbearable onto other histories of violence can also be used less defensively to articulate an unspeakable experience in indirect ways, and thus to provide a basis for a more direct confrontation. The article argues for a concept of a "multidirectional memory" in which collective processes of transference connect different histories of violence, thereby presenting an alternative to a process of mourning that focuses explusively on one's own isolated history, and in which the recognition of one's own suffering can therefore only be achieved through a denial of the suffering of the other.