Turning Herod’s Children into Jakob’s Children. Cross-generational perspectives in conceptuaizing memory and history through the perspective of “being a child”.

Abstract

Immediately after the end of the Second World War, the Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger, herself a survivor of the Holocaust, conveys both individual and collective trauma by using child protagonists as bearers of ›The Greater Hope‹ in her novel of that title (1948). More than half a century later, the British artist Ruth Rix, the only daughter of Ilse’s twin sister Helga, who found refuge in England as part of the Kindertransport, re-collects the fragments of her family’s memory. This article investigates the perspective of ‘being a child’ as a condition for the transference of memory.