Diaspora, postmemory and the transcultural turn in contemporary Jewish writing

Abstract

Since ancient times, diaspora has been intrinsically connected to Judaism. Whereas modernization and emancipation at the end of the nineteenth century had promised to end the principal rootlessness of Europe’s Jewish population, the rise of Nazism once again set them back into a diasporic and extraterritorial state. According to Marianne Hirsch, descendants of exiled Holocaust survivors unwillingly inherit their parents’ continued dislocation. As the homeland of their ancestors has ‘ceased to exist’, they are destined to remain forever exiled from the ‘space of identity’, even if they choose to return to the former homeland of their parents. According to Hirsch, the expression of this ongoing diaspora gives rise to a special narrative genre that is governed by photographic aesthetics. The authors’ imaginative completion of their parents’ experiences in the work of postmemory imitates the capacity of photography to simultaneously make present and ‘signal absence and loss’. This article will differentiate Hirsch’s approach to artistic representations of diaspora in the aftermath of the Holocaust. By outlining different conceptualizations of diaspora, I will show that in addition to the aesthetics of photography the postmemory of homelessness can also be expressed by means of nostalgic aesthetics and transcultural aesthetics. The article exemplifies all three of these types of aesthetics by investigating works by the contemporary Jewish writers David Mendelsohn, Anna Mitgutsch and Barbara Honigmann. Whereas Hirsch’s photographic aesthetics represents the melancholic insight that a return to the place of origin is impossible, nostalgic aesthetics gives in to the very desire for a ‘final return’ (Hall 1990). Both the nostalgic and the photographic aesthetics intrinsically connect identity to a distinct location and cultural belonging, which the writers attempt to restore through the work of postmemory. Transcultural aesthetics, on the other hand, expresses the interconnection of different places and cultures that arises from living in diaspora. This article concentrates on the transcultural aesthetics exemplified in the autofictional writings of Barbara Honigmann. By voluntarily going into exile, Honigmann refrains from staying attached to a distinct space and from the attempt to assemble her fragmentary knowledge about her parents’ past with regard to an imaginary homeland.