Marianne Hirsch to speak at Washington University in St. Louis

The renowned memory scholar Marianne Hirsch will be speaking at Washington University in St. Louis on November 8 at 4 pm. The talk is free and open to the public. Marianne Hirsch's name is most often linked to her formulation of "postmemory" in the book Family Frames and in subsequent articles written individually and with her partner Leo Spitzer.

I read the news of Hirsch's visit to St. Louis with a mixture of excitement and disappointment, because just 3 years ago, I was a student at Wash U and the focus of my dissertation was postmemory in contemporary Spain.  While I will be attending a conference in St. Louis next week, I will unfortunately not be able to attend this talk. During my 6 years at Washington University, I was able to hear many exciting, renowned speakers from a variety of disciplines. Anyone in the St. Louis area that researches memory should make time to attend this important lecture!!

Examining the role of memory in reconstructing family history
Marianne Hirsch to deliver Holocaust Memorial Lecture for Assembly Series Nov. 8
October 21, 2010
By Barbara Rea

For many children of Holocaust survivors — collectively known as the “second generation” — there is a longing to understand pre-war life, culture and community experienced by their parents before the trauma of expulsion, incarceration and brutalization.

Marianne Hirsch, PhD, a member of this generation and a distinguished scholar on memory and cultural history, argues that post-Holocaust generations, with their profound need to vicariously participate in this bygone world, experience “postmemory” — a term Hirsch has coined to convey the ways generations born after the Holocaust access the experiences of the witnesses through mediation and imaginative reconstruction.

Hirsch will be on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis to explore these themes for the Holocaust Memorial Lecture, an Assembly Series program at 4 p.m. Monday, Nov. 8, in Graham Chapel. The lecture, titled “Rites of Return: The Afterlife of the Holocaust in Jewish Memory,” is free and open to the public.

“Postmemory refers to the ways in which generations born after a traumatic event access the experiences of the witnesses,” says Erin McGlothlin, PhD, associate professor of Germanic languages and literatures in Arts & Sciences and chair of the Holocaust Lecture Committee, “not through actual remembrance and recall, but through imaginative projection and re-creation.”

Images play an especially important role in this re-creation, she says.

McGlothlin also notes that, although postmemory as a concept was created to understand the Holocaust, it can be used to mine cultural memory for any traumatic event.

“In recent years, scholars have extended the concept of postmemory far beyond the particular context of the Holocaust to refer to the generational memory of disparate historical and cultural events,” McGlothlin says.

Thanks to the Internet and to several trips back to Czernowitz, Hirsch has reconstructed the once thriving center of Jewish life in Ukraine, where her parents lived.

With her husband, Leo Spitzer, she has produced a book called Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz, which explores the city that before the war was an important center of Central European Jewish intellectual life. Reviewer Monica Szurmuk, of theworld.org, writes that “Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s monumental book Ghosts of Home is a stunning marriage of intellectual curiosity and personal search.”

Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She also teaches at Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender and co-directs its Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference.

In addition to the Czernowitz publication, Hirsch has written many books, including Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory; The Familial Gaze; and Time and the Literary. She has edited or co-edited a number of volumes, including the indispensable MLA guide, Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust.

She is the recipient of a host of fellowships and has served as editor of the journal PMLA. She is on the advisory boards of two journals, Memory Studies and Contemporary Women’s Writing.

Hirsch earned bachelors, master’s and doctoral degrees from Brown University.

For more information on this and upcoming Assembly Series programs, visit assemblyseries.wustl.edu or call (314) 935-4620.

Call for Papers: Representing the Holocaust in an Age of Globalization

From UPenn CFP:

Representing the Holocaust in an Age of Globalization (abstract deadline 9/1/2010)

Rick Crownshaw (Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London)
contact email:
r.crownshaw@gold.ac.uk

The Memory and Narrative series, currently published by Transaction (based at Rutgers University), emerged from the highly acclaimed International Yearbook for Oral History and Life Stories. To date, the series comprises 14 volumes, constituting an interdisciplinary forum that stimulates debate on a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues relating to memory and narrative. 


The series editors invite proposals for a forthcoming volume entitled Representing the Holocaust in an Age of Globalization

Representing the Holocaust in an Age of Globalization

In academic study the Holocaust has been wrested from arguments as to its incomparability. For example, recent groundbreaking work in historiography has sought to remove the ‘conceptual blockages’ (Moses, Stone) in comparing modern atrocities, moving beyond conceptualizations of the Holocaust’s uniqueness that might inscribe a hierarchy of suffering across modernity. Such a comparative approach elicits the structural continuities and discontinuities between atrocious events – between, for example, genocide and colonial atrocity. In memory studies, related, current work has focused on the ‘cosmopolitan’ nature of Holocaust memory, arguing the ways that national, collective memory registers the transnational flux of remembrance, and how the global shapes the local and vice versa (Levy and Sznaider). However, in such models does the nation, no matter how ‘glocalised’, remain too coherent a structure for modeling the centrifugal dynamics of memory? Is the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of Holocaust memory still too centripetal a dynamic? And in such models, does the Holocaust eclipse other events with which it is compared or contiguous? So, a spatial approach to modernity’s extremes and the correspondent ideas of race, nation and empire that allowed them to happen, together with the increasing difficulty of discretely locating history and memory, suggests a necessary reorientation of Holocaust Studies. More recently, Holocaust memory has been theorised as ‘multidirectional’ and its proximity with the memories of other traumas, no matter how competitive and screening, rethought as the means by which Holocaust memory, protean by nature, can, in an age of decolonization, be adapted, appropriated and entered into dialogue with memories of modernity’s other atrocities (Rothberg). This proposed volume asks, among other things, how might we extend the archive of ‘multidirectional’ memory that Rothberg has so fruitfully begun to explore. What are the implications of ‘multidirectionality’ for the writing of Holocaust history as well as for the study of Holocaust memory? How might memory practitioners and activists use the ‘multidirectional’ archive, and the concept itself, in politically and juridically transformative ways to effect transnational justice? Put another way, how can we move from an ethics of history and memory to material, political and juridical effects? And what of the very definition of memory itself in an age of globalization? As media technologies facilitate the ways that Holocaust memories become unmoored from groups and individuals that lay claim to them, to be shared and inflected by others on a global stage, do definitions of memory (secondary, shared, post, prosthetic) become even more attenuated? Do the itineraries of representations of the Holocaust call for a rethinking of the relationship between history and memory, their definitions and disciplinary boundaries?

The editors invite submissions from across the disciplines, at both a meta-level, exploring the state of Holocaust Studies, and as well as at the level of individual case studies of the transculturation, transnationalisation and globalization of Holocaust memory.

Submissions might address but are not limited to the following themes:

• The changing nature of the archive in a digital age as resource for Holocaust history and memory;
• Global memory and history as a basis for transnational justice and reparations claims, and what serves as legitimate and authoritative evidence, what satisfies claims for recognition and restitution;
• The limits of concepts of transcultural, transnational and global memory and history;
• Globalization and methodological change in historiography, oral historiography, and literary and testimony studies; new comparative methodologies;
• Global inflections in Holocaust museum, memorial and monument practice; commemorative forms used to remember the Holocaust and how they might shape memories of other atrocities around the world;
• Postmodern philosophies of Holocaust representation;
• Theories of ‘secondary witnessing’ (Apel), ‘postmemory’ (Hirsch), ‘prosthetic memory’ (Landsberg), and ‘fantasies’ of witnessing (Weissman) in an age of global memory;
• Citizenship, migration and the uses of Holocaust history and memory.
• ‘Screen’ and political memory;
• Comparative approaches to the Holocaust, slavery and colonialism

Please send a 500-word abstract, along with a short C.V., to the editors of this proposed volume, Rick Crownshaw (r.crownshaw@gold.ac.uk) and Albert Lichtblau (Albert.Lichtblau@sbg.ac.at), by September 1, 2010. Contributors chosen on the basis of their abstracts will be asked to submit essays (approximately 6,000 words), for further consideration, by March 1, 2010.

Memory and Narrative Series Editors:
Prof. S. Leydesdorff (S.Leijdesdorff@uva.nl)
Prof. A. Lichtblau (Albert.Lichtblau@sbg.ac.at)
Dr. R. Crownshaw (R.Crownshaw@gold.ac.uk)
Dr. N. Adler (N.Adler@Niod.knaw.nl)
Dr. Adam Brown (adb2004@med.cornell.edu)
Yifat Gutman (gutmy472@newschool.edu)

Documentary Film - "A Generation Apart" (1984)

I am in the final stages of planning for the honors seminar course on memory and historical trauma that I am teaching this semester. One of the films I have been considering is "A Generation Apart," which was originally produced in 1984, but re-released on DVD in 2007. If I do end up using this film in class, I will do so in conjunction with a discussion of postmemory. I am really surprised that I did not come across this film earlier, during research for my dissertation (I'm sure I must have read about it, though I never saw it). The film is not a documentary masterpiece, but I do believe it is a valuable text with which to look at the particular challenges facing second-generation descendants of Holocaust survivors (and perhaps, by extension, descendants of other historical traumas). Director Jack Fisher interviews his parents, Auschwitz survivors, and his older brother Joe in an attempt to understand how the direct, lived experience of the Holocaust, as well as its intergenerational transmission, have affected his family. A Generation Apart also includes poignant interviews between the director's friend Shelley and her mother Mary, who survived Bergen-Belsen. There are obvious moments of tension between parents and children, and between the siblings as well. Of particular note is the segment in which the Fisher brothers address one another regarding the importance of the Shoah in their everyday lives.

New Book - Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory

I always get particularly excited when a publication comes out with "postmemory" in the title. I wrote my dissertation on postmemory in contemporary Spanish literature and film; however, I drew largely from the field of Holocaust Studies in my discussion of the intergenerational transmission of trauma.

"Postmemory" is a term popularized by -- and most associated with - Marianne Hirsch, although it was also deployed by Andrea Liss in Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography and the Holocaust. I am not positive, but I do think Liss used the term first -- albeit in a slightly different manner -- which Hirsch acknowledges. Hirsch defines postmemory as "the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events taht they can neither understand nor re-create" ("Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy," 8). In addition to Hirsch's formulation, Holocaust Studies scholars have created a large, rich body of work on "second generation" cultural production, with "second generation" referring broadly to the descendants of Holocaust survivors (and yes, at times, also to the descendants of perpetrators).

At some point, I will dedicate another post (or several) to the concept of "postmemory" itself, which has recently come under fire in Beatriz Sarlo's Tiempo pasado. Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo. Una discusión (to read an excellent review in English of Sarlo's work, see here). For now, I will limit this post to the mention of the following new book from Routledge:

Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory

By Brett Kaplan

Series: Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

List Price: $95.00
Add to Cart

* ISBN: 978-0-415-87476-2
* Binding: Hardback
* Published by: Routledge
* Publication Date: 31/08/2010
* Pages: 192

About the Book

How do the spaces of the past stay with us through representations—whether literary or photographic? How has the Holocaust registered in our increasingly globally connected consciousness? What does it mean that this European event is often used as an interpretive or representational touchstone for genocides and traumas globally? In this interdisciplinary study, Kaplan asks and attempts to answer these questions by looking at historically and geographically diverse spaces, photographs, and texts concerned with the physical and/or mental landscape of the Holocaust and its transformations from the postwar period to the early twenty-first century. Examining the intersections of landscape, postmemory, and trauma, Kaplan's text offers a significant contribution to our understanding of the spatial, visual, and literary reach of the Holocaust.

John Demjanjuk Case

Questions of the Day: what does this case say to you about the question of justice and reparations in the case of genocidal acts and crimes against humanity? How is the concept of "victim" being defined here?

When I was growing up in northeast Ohio, I often heard about the case of John Demjanjuk. He is currently being tried for the "mass killing of Jews," which he is alleged to have carried out as a Nazi prison guard. He is 89 and was carried into the courtroom on a stretcher today -- his lawyer contends Demjanjuk is very ill and a victim himself, while others claim he is a Nazi criminal putting on a theatrical show.

Read more here: "Demjanjuk trial shows double standards, lawyer says" (BBC)