Some Notes on Remembrance

In an interview, Michael Rothberg pointed out that he had turned against a sentimental pop-culture view of the Holocaust quite early.

Ich verstand meine damalige Arbeit als Versuch, in diese Triangulation einzugreifen, indem ich einige Glaubensdogmen rund um den Holocaust infrage stellte, die ihn für eine rührselige Popkultur ausbeutbar machten und zugleich als Schutzwall gegen eine Kritik der israelischen Politik dienten – eine Politik, die ich zunehmend als unrechtmäßige Besatzung und Enteignung der Palästinenser sah.

Rothberg workes with a two-dimensional axis system (though he calls his work multi-directional) which creates four quadrants of forms of remembrance, which make it possible to empathize with different traumata without prioritizing them or reducing them to a general pattern in a lossy fashion.

A similar tack is the newspaper column Muslimisch-jüdisches Abendbrot by the political scientist Saba-Nur Cheema (publications) and Meron Mendel, who search for the commonalities in the differences (discussion report) as part of their marriage. These columns have now been bundled in a book.

A different tack is the term postmemory that Marianne Hirsch coined. For Hirsch, it is the biographical memory of her own childhood being less vivid than the Holocaust narratives of her parents in Romania that makes her conceptualize this idea.

To grow up with overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s consciousness, is to risk having one’s own life stories displaced, even evacuated, by our ancestors.

This quote is from the book The Generation of Post Memory from 2012,  which was not the first time that Hirsch pondered these matters. She already discussed this concept in Family Frames which is available in the Internet archive.