Renegotiating Postmemory: The Holocaust in Contemporary German-Language Jewish Literature by Maria Roca Lizarazu

Abstract

Reviewed by: Renegotiating Postmemory: The Holocaust in Contemporary German-Language Jewish Literature by Maria Roca Lizarazu Ashley Passmore Maria Roca Lizarazu, Renegotiating Postmemory: The Holocaust in Contemporary German-Language Jewish Literature. Rochester: Camden House, 2020. 236 pp. Renegotiating Postmemory by Maria Roca Lizarazu begins with an introduction in which she guides the reader through some debates in Holocaust memory, in particular those of the last two decades, with numerous references to the terminology from various disciplines that shape the vocabulary of memory and trauma theory more generally. The introduction also helps to lay the historical groundwork for the necessity of the project itself: in a period of [End Page 169] "post-scarcity," when access to Holocaust imagery and testimony has grown in abundance thanks to new tools and a robust body of scholarship and digitization, and in a time of the diversification and globalization of Holocaust memory, when Holocaust memorialization has been unmoored from its own historical conditions and used as a signifier of a specific ethics and aesthetics of memory, it is eminently reasonable to want to reconsider the terms informing Jewish positionality and cultural production in Europe today, as this book sets out to do. A significant portion of the theoretical taxonomy in Roca Lizarazu's introduction focuses on the condition of a mediated Holocaust memory with primacy in visual culture. Perhaps this focus is in order to situate and ultimately point out the limitations of Marianne Hirsch's theory of postmemory (as the title of the book would suggest), which draws so heavily on the emotional immediacy and traumatic import of visual imagery, such as photography, and which continues to dominate theoretical interventions in Jewish cultural production (Hirsch 1997; Hirsch 2012). The problems begin when the hypermediated glut of Holocaust imagery becomes complicit, as Roca Lizarazu suggests, in creating uniform, monological Holocaust narratives that tend toward unquestioned narratival authority. In its place, Roca Lizarazu offers the potential treasure trove of literary expression as a knowledge source of the new state of affairs for contemporary Jewish writers. Indeed, Roca Lizarazu calls for a "novelization of our contemporary memory cultures" (170), in which Jewish writing in German of the third generation is more fully captured as the expression of the reality of today's diverse, transnational, and multilingual Jewish community in Austria and Germany. Roca Lizarazu thus builds on recent scholarship about the multi-perspectival cultural allegiances and on-going ambivalences regarding memory culture within contemporary Jewish writing in German, such as that of Katja Garloff and Agnes Mueller (2018) and Leslie Morris (2018). This book also supplements other scholars' work on the generational dislocation, self-reflexivity, and ambivalence in the third generation, such as Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger (2017), with new and compelling analysis of significant novels by German-language writers who have not yet received the scholarly attention they deserve. Postmemory theory, although its scope has grown wider over the years to encompass a more diverse range of encounters with traumatic memory, began, by Hirsch's own admission, as an attempt to describe the "hinge generation" or second generation of Holocaust survivors, whose role as "guardians [End Page 170] of the Holocaust" happened on the level of the mythical without immediate access to the experience of their parents. Postmemory thus emphasizes the family narrative (though it later expanded to encompass "affiliative," or non-inherited traumatic memory), and can often employ rather rudimentary ideas about transmission of memory as a necessary consequence of the perceived silence of the survivor generation. Roca Lizarazu is right to want to question how pertinent the conditions of the third generation are to the now-canonical organizing principle of postmemory theory, particularly since the familial dynamics of later generations are far more layered and conflicted, and the impact of the Holocaust as a trauma and an emblematic memorial subject has expanded considerably across discursive boundaries. Still, there are places where this volume does not give full consideration to some of the motives behind the ongoing interest in postmemory theory. Notably absent in Roca Lizarazu's assessment of postmemory is the impact of the scholarly research in epigenetics, the study of the impact of environment and experience of organisms on genetic transmission...