Mariann Hirsch

Marianne Hirsch introduces to us a new word, postmemory, in her essay “Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy.” Hirsch defines postmemory as when a child of a survivor of a cultural trauma remembers stories because of what their parents told them. Hirsch, being a child of a survivor of the Holocaust, has many postmemories from her parents. Postmemory is like receiving a memory from someone else. It’s a memory that you did not witness yourself but were told by someone else, and after hearing their memory you feel as if it happened to you. A postmemory is something you may never get to live. Usually, a postmemory is something that happened that is very traumatic and affected many people.

When you think of a memory you think of something happy or something good that happened. But then what is postmemory? Postmemory is really different, because I think with postmemory most people remember the things that are the most traumatic and that affect the many people. For example, in history class what we are taught and what most of us remember is when people die, not all the good stuff like when they get married or how much money they have to their name. Also, I remember how many people died at war not how many survived. Remembering all the traumatic events are probably not a good thing for some people, because then all they do is worry about it and thinks that it is going to happen to them. For example, after 9/11 and the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center everyone was so scared to fly because a terrorist could take over their plane. Or some people wouldn’t go shopping at the Mega Mall in Minneapolis because that might be the terrorist’s next target.

In addition to postmemory being a bad memory, if it involves children it makes the memory seem more traumatic. A person always seems to remember the thing that happen to children and these events tend to stick in your mind a little more than things that happen to adults. I think the reason it is like this is because when you see something bad happen to a child you think that they are so helpless and defenseless so it sticks in your mind a little more. Everyone then realizes that we were all helpless children at one time too and it could happen to us. Hirsch says a child victim is a horror in anyone’s eyes because it is the saddest way to see cultural trauma. I didn’t notice this until after this essay, but whenever I think of the Holocaust I think of children at concentration camps

In Hirsch’s essay she states her own and other people’s postmemories by showing pictures and sharing stories. In this essay she talks about three different photos. The photo I think is the best at explaining postmemory and is the one I will concentrate on is the photo by Lorie Novak. It is a photo of the children of Izieu and underneath it, in a shadowlike view, is a mom holding her baby and also a photo Ethel Rosenberg, a mother that was executed (264). Hirsch sees herself in this photo as the crying child held by her mother looking at the group of children, and Rosenberg knowing what is going to happen to them. This creates a postmemory because it is something she saw when she was young and it was very traumatic, so she thence got a memory from it. This example is one of which explains postmemory as being a memory of traumatic events and one of which involves children.

Hirsch’s word postmemory can be broken down deeper into two different views of postmemory, heteropathic and idiopathic identification. Hirsch definition of heteropathic postmemory is feeling sympathy but keeping a distance. Hirsch explains this by thinking, “it could have been me; it was me, also,” and at the same time, “but it wasn’t me” (268). Idiopathic postmemory is feeling sympathy, but you get involved. For example, you feel sorry for the person and you actually put your self in their position. In Novak’s photo Hirsch views it in idiopathic view; she got involved in the picture and put herself in the photo. She put herself in the time of the Holocaust and felt for them. I viewed that photo heteropathically because I just viewed it as Hirsch being the baby and I viewed it through her eyes. After 9/11 the people who were scared to fly or shop at the Mega Mall were viewing that tragedy through the idiopathic postmemory and were putting them self in the tragedy.

Hirsch also uses some other words when describing postmemory like punctum, studium, identification, and projection. Punctum is when you see something different or unfamiliar and it hits you with a prick or a wound. For this, I think of it as Hirsch’s essay because I read it and I didn’t even understand anything at first and it frustrated me or wounded me. Studium is seeing something familiar. Identification is a term she uses that is related to heteropathic postmemory. It is the when you think it could have been me but you identify