Loose Bits of Shrapnel: War Stories, Photographs, and the Peculiarities of Postmemory

Abstract

This article traces the paradoxical effects of my father’s World War II stories and a series of published photographs on my brother and me. It is a self-reflexive essay that also engages the Holocaust historiography on intergenerational legacies of the Holocaust and critiques the “transmitted trauma” concept. Instead, a vocabulary of gendered absence, anxiety, and disappointment is presented, and postmemories that were co-constructed in father-son relationships are imagined to be like shrapnel. It also argues that intergenerational legacies are less about past violence and more about parents’ ability or inability to work through their emotions to be “good enough” parents in children’s daily lives. In closing, the unfolding dynamic between second and third generations in my own family is considered.