The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust by Marianne Hirsch (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust by Marianne Hirsch Brad Prager The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust Marianne Hirsch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. 305 pp. Although T. W. Adorno’s inquiry into the viability of lyric poetry after Auschwitz is widely discussed and interpreted, far less attention is paid to the idea of an overall post-Holocaust ban on photography. Owing perhaps to photography’s ubiquity, much of Marianne Hirsch’s writing in The Generation of Postmemory deals with photo essays, mixed media work, and gallery installations. Poetry is, as she notes, “only one of many media of transmission” (2). Hirsch is interested in, for example, W. G. Sebald’s photographically illustrated novel Austerlitz as well as in Art Spiegelman’s Maus. In her view both texts share a common interest in psychoanalytically inflected narratives, specifically, the loss of mothers, while they also insistently problematize the truth claims and referentiality of their images. The nine chapters of Hirsch’s book, a number of which have already appeared in journals, trace the varied paths of postmemory, and go well beyond the realms of Sebald and Spiegelman, covering a good deal of material that has hardly been considered elsewhere, including Jeffrey Wolin’s 1997 exhibition Written in Memory: Portraits of the Holocaust and the 1998 book And I Still See Their Faces: Images of Polish Jews. Hirsch also explores some challenging and controversial art objects, including David Levinthal’s photo series Mein Kampf, in which a lingering hint of pornography prompts a confrontation with the uneasiness generally associated with viewing atrocity photos. Postmemory, as the term is used here, is contiguous with memory insofar as it suggests a way of understanding all memory as always already [End Page 149] mediated. Whatever thoughts we have of the past, whether our experiences are lived or adopted, are to some extent screens onto which needs and desires are projected. Postmemory, however, distinguishes itself from memory insofar as it is generally a heteropathic phenomenon, in that it threatens to usurp the identifying subject’s own personality, yet it is simultaneously filtered through familial or other group relations. In the case of traumatically based postmemories, enormous distances must be spanned and, Hirsch explains, “in the specific case of catastrophic memory—such as the memory of slavery or the Holocaust—that distance cannot ultimately be bridged; the break between then and now, between the one who lived it and the one who did not remains monumental and insurmountable, even as the heteropathic imagination struggles to overcome it” (86). Throughout Hirsch’s writing, tensions are produced where models of identification enter into dialogue with discourses of trauma, and she is particularly cautious when it comes to the pitfalls of overidentification, not least her own. How close can one get to another’s wounds, without inadvertently or willfully mistaking them for one’s own? Hirsch reads many objects—some are art objects, others are historical fragments of realia—and their detailed examination provides the basis for her most evocative analyses. Her study of a photograph of her parents, in a chapter written jointly with Leo Spitzer, is one of the book’s liveliest; it continually thematizes the encounter with hermeneutic limits. Hirsch and Spitzer write about the needs and desires that shape their own interpretation, and about how, even after digitally enlarging and scrutinizing an image that was once quite small, they were forced to acknowledge that their interpretations were inconclusive. They consider the extent to which they project onto her parents’ past hopes and desires for freedom that may not have been there. A speck on the surface of the image, one that may or may not have been a Jewish star, becomes an abyssal point of reading, or a cipher—a symbol of the project’s own opaque end. One key issue with which the book engages, and with which many of Hirsch’s readers will be familiar, concerns the question of how the perspective of the perpetrator, and more specifically, our knowledge of the original standpoint of photos taken by German soldiers or Nazis, informs...