This thesis examines the problematic status and functioning of memory in a variety of contemporary contexts such as judicial cases, popular culture, television, memorials and museums. In doing this it develops an account of the culture of postmemory, originally defined by Marianne Hirsch as the experience of descendents of survivors of trauma, particularly second generation Holocaust survivors, who inherit that trauma from their family forbears. From Hirsch, postmemory can be understood as the possibility of remembering an event that one has not actually experienced. This thesis extends Hirsch???s notion of postmemory to account for a wider range of contemporary memory practices. These occur beyond family relationships to manifest in institutional and discursive sites such as the archive, the museum, the narrative and the tourist attraction. This thesis argues that it is in these sites that memory can be seen to be breaking away from its referential function. Instead of recollection, memory becomes the performance of slippage and the undoing of reference in which the fictive and the historical merge. The thesis plays out the ensuing crisis in recollection in scenes and actions of a theatre of the postmemorial ??? one characterised less by the familiar linear narratives of memory as by multiple and contradictory narratives formed through the operations of chance, reflexivity and ambivalence working within the contemporary cultural sphere. Performing Postmemories re-imagines the performances of contemporary memory culture and examines its master texts.

This thesis examines the problematic status and functioning of memory in a variety of contemporary contexts such as judicial cases, popular culture, television, memorials and museums. In doing this it develops an account of the culture of postmemory, originally defined by Marianne Hirsch as the experience of descendents of survivors of trauma, particularly second generation Holocaust survivors, who inherit that trauma from their family forbears. From Hirsch, postmemory can be understood as the possibility of remembering an event that one has not actually experienced. This thesis extends Hirsch???s notion of postmemory to account for a wider range of contemporary memory practices. These occur beyond family relationships to manifest in institutional and discursive sites such as the archive, the museum, the narrative and the tourist attraction. This thesis argues that it is in these sites that memory can be seen to be breaking away from its referential function. Instead of recollection, memory becomes the performance of slippage and the undoing of reference in which the fictive and the historical merge. The thesis plays out the ensuing crisis in recollection in scenes and actions of a theatre of the postmemorial ??? one characterised less by the familiar linear narratives of memory as by multiple and contradictory narratives formed through the operations of chance, reflexivity and ambivalence working within the contemporary cultural sphere. Performing Postmemories re-imagines the performances of contemporary memory culture and examines its master texts.

A presente investigação tem como objetivo estabelecer a relevância da relação dos descendentes do Holocausto com a memória desse evento através da análise da obra Meu coração Ferido, escrita por Martin Doerry. Essa obra retrata a trajetória de uma mulher judia entre 1900 e 1944, mostrando como as medidas nazistas alteraram seu cotidiano, incluindo cartas escritas no período no qual esteve confinada em um campo de concentração. Ela possui um destaque dentro da literatura atual devido a sua narrativa, que mescla textos produzidos na época com a contextualização dos fatos feita pelo autor. Pretende-se apontar como ocorre a transferência desse tipo de memória com descendentes de vítimas do holocausto, mostrando como as gerações posteriores convivem com esse tipo de memória e escrevem sobre a mesma. / This research aims to analyze the Holocaust representation possibilities from a biography, \"Meu Coração Ferido,\" written by Martin Doerry, and seek to understand how occur the Nazi understanding of processes during installation and the prospect of separated families war, using as source letters exchanged in the period. During the writing process of this work, the author\'s purpose was to understand how his grandmother, Lilli Jahn, differed from others who suffered under Nazism, in their struggle for the liberation of the children and their peculiar character and the preservation and protection of the family. The research focuses on the study of how the descendants understand the Holocaust through in their search for an identity for many years silenced.

A presente investigação tem como objetivo estabelecer a relevância da relação dos descendentes do Holocausto com a memória desse evento através da análise da obra Meu coração Ferido, escrita por Martin Doerry. Essa obra retrata a trajetória de uma mulher judia entre 1900 e 1944, mostrando como as medidas nazistas alteraram seu cotidiano, incluindo cartas escritas no período no qual esteve confinada em um campo de concentração. Ela possui um destaque dentro da literatura atual devido a sua narrativa, que mescla textos produzidos na época com a contextualização dos fatos feita pelo autor. Pretende-se apontar como ocorre a transferência desse tipo de memória com descendentes de vítimas do holocausto, mostrando como as gerações posteriores convivem com esse tipo de memória e escrevem sobre a mesma. / This research aims to analyze the Holocaust representation possibilities from a biography, \"Meu Coração Ferido,\" written by Martin Doerry, and seek to understand how occur the Nazi understanding of processes during installation and the prospect of separated families war, using as source letters exchanged in the period. During the writing process of this work, the author\'s purpose was to understand how his grandmother, Lilli Jahn, differed from others who suffered under Nazism, in their struggle for the liberation of the children and their peculiar character and the preservation and protection of the family. The research focuses on the study of how the descendants understand the Holocaust through in their search for an identity for many years silenced.

By investigating the metaphorical connection between bloodletting and the act of writing and drawing, this thesis examines the effects and potential dangers of bearing witness and recording witness testimonials as it is experienced by first-generation and second-generation Holocaust witnesses/authors respectively. Primo Levi’s works as well as biographical records documenting his life and death are examined as the primary sources for the analysis of the survivor or first-generation witness/author. Art Spiegelman’s graphic novels Maus and Maus II provide the source materials for the exploration of the second or ‘postmemory’ generation’s experience with recording their own inherited transgenerational trauma. To support this metaphorical and theoretical framework, I will engage the theories of Janet McCord and her study on suicide and Holocaust survivors as well as employ the works of Sigmund Freud, Dominick LaCapra, Cathy Caruth and Marianne Hirsch in relation to their work on cultural trauma and memory. / Graduate

This paper explores the `creative' process of postmemory in relation to family photographs, story telling, the absence of memory, and the subsequent construction of new and elastic family histories in my MFA thesis artwork. I define postmemory and how it relates to the limited number of existing photographs that document my family's experience as displaced persons and immigrants. I also discuss how literalist art has influenced the works in my thesis exhibition and outline the reasons for the absence of actual photographs in my work. Then, drawing from Freud's ideas of the condensation of dreams and the formation of screen memories, I discuss the relationship between historical family photographs, the memories elicited by them, and the act of forgetting to reveal the elasticity of truth in postmemory and how my work represents the beginnings of a personal understanding of a fragmented family history riddled with holes and unknowns. I also describe and discuss the two installation works found in my thesis exhibition, which are titled Descendant and Lineage. Finally, I outline the influence of other artists and describe how these ideas are tied together in my artwork.

No description available.

Cultural memory and its media have a productive power in constructing historical nar- ratives. Especially, in Central and Eastern Europe, memory is mostly created through bottom- up processes: The past is mediated in the public sphere and imagined in popular culture (Blacker, Etkind 2013: 10). The velvet revolution is followed by a memory boom in the Czech Republic, in which media acts as memory activists addressing tabooed memories. At a time where the last witnesses of the expulsion are passing away, the dying voice is taken up by media This thesis aims to explore the determinant patterns of the Czech narrative in post-1989 fiction. Particularly, it focuses on postmemorial representations. The thesis is based on an anal- ysis of five fictional works dealing with the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans. The expulsion is embedded in the century-long co-habitation with the Sudeten German depicted as a neigh- bour. However, the Sudeten Germans are only incorporated into a regional but not the national Czech identity. While the expulsion is reframed in an ethical-legal framework, on a narrative level strategies of individualisation and universalisation are employed to make the past acces- sible for those born later.

What is the relationship between writing in the present and the traumatic historical events that form the subject of that writing? What narrative strategies do authors employ in order to negotiate the ethical and epistemological problems raised by this gap in time and experience? “Trauma theory” is undermined by clinical controversies and contradictory claims for “literal truth” and “incomprehensibility”. Similarly, the Holocaust has been considered inherently unrepresentable unless by those who witnessed it, leading to a false opposition between genres of “testimony” and “fiction”. A way out of these dead ends is to consider the role of the first-person narrator in contemporary Holocaust narratives. While use of this device risks an inappropriate level of identification with those whose experience is both extreme and unknowable, I argue that this problem may be resolved to an extent through “transgenerational empathy”, an approach to the past that is self-reflexive, incorporates ideas of time, memory and generations, and moves both towards and away from the victims of the past in a simultaneous gesture of proximity and distance. For this theory I draw on Dominick LaCapra’s definitions of empathy and “empathic unsettlement”, and on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s concept of the “fusion of horizons” between past and present. Transgenerational empathy involves giving equal weight to “memory” and “history”. An over-emphasis on memory leads to narratives that are merely identificatory, such as Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces and Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments. In contrast, W. G. Sebald’s use of a narrative persona in The Emigrants and Austerlitz enables transgenerational empathy in narrative by simultaneously imposing layers of distance while establishing close personal connection. Similarly, Jonathan Safran Foer’s third-generation aesthetic of “post-postmemory” in Everything is Illuminated uses a “dual persona” device to foreground empathically the abyss at the heart of any attempt to recapture the past. My analysis of these authors draws on the writings of Gillian Rose, Paul Ricoeur, Marianne Hirsch and Jacques Derrida. However, the concept of “transgenerational empathy” would benefit from further research, both in terms of its “temporal dimension” and the use of narrative personae by other contemporary authors such as Philip Roth.

Holocaust survivor Dr. Yaffa Eliach collected over 6,000 photographs depicting residents of Eishyshok, a small Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe, taken between 1890 and 1941. Eliach survived the Nazi-led massacre in 1941 that killed nearly the entire Jewish population of Eishyshok. As a way to commemorate the destroyed town of her youth she began to collect photographs from other survivors and residents who fled Europe prior to the Holocaust. She subsequently selected 1,032 photographs from the Yaffa Eliach Shtetl Collection for display in The Tower of Faces, a permanent exhibition in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, located in Washington, DC. The Tower of Faces is a multivalent exhibition. What the photographs represent has changed as time has passed and the collection has served multiple purposes. For Eliach, who has a personal connection to the collection and to events the images have come to represent, the exhibition is a monument within a memorial museum that specifically visually depicts and commemorates Eishyshok and its residents. Once the photographs were accessioned into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s permanent collection exhibition designers and curators used the photographs to facilitate a connection between visitors who may not have a direct association to the Holocaust. For visitors, the familial photographs do not represent direct memories or evidence of atrocity, as they do for Eliach. Rather, the Tower of Faces is a site of postmemory and the photographs is what connects the Holocaust to Eliach’s memory of the Holocaust to visitors’ understanding of the Holocaust.