Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning And Post-Memory

In contemporary society, our knowledge of the past is articulated through the interplay between history and memory, which work to expose the elusive truths of the past, and exemplify the strength of humanity. Richard White, a historian, posits; “History is the enemy of memory...History forges weapons from what memory has forgotten or suppressed.” This definition postulates that there is an inevitable dichotomy between the accretion of factual evidence and the subjectivity of personal experience by shaping the collective past of humanity. However, as indicated by Mark Baker’s memoir, The Fiftieth Gate and Cathy Wilcox’s Cartoon, both of which explore perceptions of the Holocaust through an array of unique and evocative literary

The implications of the Holocaust and the extent to which perceptions of the event have shaped Jewish views of identity are among the most crucial in today’s society. Literature revealed that although children of Holocaust survivors and perpetrators did not experience events directly, they might suffer in some form. Jewish descendants experience symptoms of trauma and bear the burden of replacing the dead. According to clinical experience and empirical research, this clinical population seems to have specific disturbances focused on difficulties in coping with stress and a high vulnerability to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This literature review will focus first on how trauma is transmitted and will then discuss the existence of any indicators of psychopathology in the offspring of Holocaust survivors.

“Postmemory” describes the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before-to experiences they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. (Hirsch 2016)

Every act of remembering is also, intrinsically, an act of forgetting. Giving preference to particular details of an event lessens the immediacy of others. Thus, memory is its own, unique narrative culled from an almost endless sea of details present, and sometimes not present, in the original event. Memory is the past, reformulated and interpreted through the lens of the present (Huyssen 1995). When an event is commemorated through a physical act of memory, the narrowing of possible details becomes even more finely tuned, limited by the physical scope of possibilities for bodies in a three-dimensional space.

Do events of the past affect an individual’s life? How important are memories of the past for people of the future? Does the past, even relate to the future at all? To figure out the answers to these questions, one has to understand the impact that past events can do to one’s future. Events in the past are essential to an individual 's development and can change their perspective of life. As a matter of fact, you can see these questions being answered in Classical Literature, Modern Literature, Current Events and even Visual Rhetoric.

Events in the past are preserved through photographs, writings and libraries. Can memories conserve the historical occurrence to the present? The theory of memory transmission states that a “massive trauma experienced by a group in the historical past can be experienced by an individual living centuries later who shares a similar attribute of the historical group” (Balaev 151). In the story “Cattle Car Complex” by Thane Rosenbaum, Adam Posner is a second generation survivor of the Holocaust. He displays symptoms of post-trauma when stuck in an elevator. Mr. Posner’s parents were prisoners of concentration camps and their memories transmit to him “so deeply as to seem to constitute memories” of his own (Hirsch 1). The Holocaust is a “Nazi Judeocide”

The Nazis killed over six million Jews and millions of other Polish and Soviet civilians in the Holocaust. They also killed gypsies, physically and mentally disabled people and homosexuals. The number of survivors today are quickly dwindling down. Clinical psychologist Natan Kellermann defines a Holocaust survivor as any Jew who lived under Nazi occupation and was threatened by the “final solution” (Kellermann 199). This definition can be applied to not only Jews, but to anyone in general whose life was threatened by the Nazis. When these survivors were liberated, they believed the suffering was over, but for many, this wasn’t the case. The trauma of the horrors they faced is still evident in their life. By analyzing the effects of post traumatic stress disorder after the Holocaust, readers can see that the aftermath of the Holocaust is still prevalent in the survivor’s everyday life; This is important to show that while the trauma may not be overcome, the survivor can be more at peace with the events.

From 1933 to 1945, millions of lives were thrown into chaos because of the Holocaust. Families were ripped apart and values were washed away as citizens were forcefully placed in concentration camps to either be immediately killed or to work until they died. Every person within the camps faced unthinkable trauma. Once everyone was released, the prisoners began to search for lost loved ones and a sense of normality. However, the anguish did not end with the end of the Holocaust. Following the Holocaust, first generation survivors developed abnormal values, societal dependence, and a need to avoid the topic of the Holocaust as an effect of their trauma; these side effects were then passed down to future generations

On December 16, 1942, some 400 young Jewish women were rallied in the main square of the camp and were mercilessly shot down. Not only did this affect the people who lived through the holocaust, it also affected everyone who just so happened to be connected to those arguably fortunate individuals who survived. “After more research was done, it was clear the adaptation and coping mechanisms of the survivors was affected by the aspects of their childhood experiences,”. More than one million victims of the Holocaust were

Jonathan Safran Foer explores the power of memory in order to illustrate the cyclical nature of history and the way in which emotional trauma transfers through the generations, revealing that attachment to memories can be empowering but also confining. Foer illustrates the cyclical nature of history through the short-lived birth of Zosha’s baby and the miraculous birth of Brod, both of whose

Memory – what it is, how it works, and how it might be manipulated – has long been a subject of curious fascination. Remembering, the mind-boggling ability in which the human brain can conjure up very specific, very lucid, long-gone episodes from any given point on the timeline of our lives, is an astounding feat. Yet, along with our brain’s ability of remembrance comes also the concept of forgetting: interruptions of memory or “an inability of consciousness to make present to itself what it wants” (Honold, 1994, p. 2). There is a very close relationship between remembering and forgetting; in fact, the two come hand-in-hand. A close reading of Joshua Foer’s essay, “The End of Remembering”, and Susan Griffin’s piece, “Our Secret”, directs us

Collective memories are important because “they are constructed, not simply reproduced”(5). Historical memories “transmit selective knowledge about the past”(5). Simply, collective memories are we chose to remember the past, while historical memories are the facts, albeit selective facts, of history. One issue of collective memory stems from the ability to selectively remember and forget the past(6). Historical memories face issue of being misrepresented or misused by those seeking to create a certain memory(12). Collective memory can also be misused to appear to represent the majorities memory, often used in the form of “public monuments” that are either owned by the public nor have been erected with public consensus(13). Historical memory

Postmemory affected Art throughout his life because of his father’s dramatic life experiences. Marianne Hirsch describes Postmemory with some hesitation because she thinks that it may imply that we are “beyond memory” and she doesn’t want people to think that’s what she means. Postmemory is different from regular memory because it is caused by generation gaps, like the gap between Art and Vladek. It is “a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated, not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation...Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated” (Hirsch, 1997: 22).

Memory is one of our greatest assets. “It is how we know who we are. Memory gives us a sense of history, our origin, roots, and identity. By it we relive special events, birthdays, anniversaries and days of national significance. The Lord’s Supper is a call to remember Christ and the cross.” The relationships we have in our lives often become stronger as we take time to reflect on what that person has done for us in the past and continues to do for us. As adults we are able to look back and see the sacrifices our parents made for us and we realize just how much they

Memory is a dynamic collective, never in stasis, never alone, always social, always in conversation with other memories of other individuals. Collective memory, writes Haim Weinberg, “refers to the shared pool of information held in the memories of two or more members of a group. Collective memory can be shared, passed on and constructed by small and large groups” (Weinberg 143). By extension, “A ‘collective memory’, as a set of ideas, images, feelings about the past, is best located not in the minds of individuals, but in the re they share. There is no reason to privilege one form of resource over another—for example, to see history books as important but popular movies as not” (Irwin-Zarecka 4). Since it is an “interaction of people’s minds” (Weinberg 143), it follows that such memory, because even the past is always-already formative [THE PK AND THEIR RELATIONS TO THE MUSLIMS IS AN EXAMPLE], must always be subject to distortion, always open to be manipulated. {Let us take the example of a conversation from the Christopher Nolan movie Memento: Teddy: Lenny, you can't trust a man's life to your little notes and pictures Leonard: Why not?