Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory proposes that descendants of people who survived traumatic experiences, such as war, genocide, and displacement are affected by their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences, and that such memories affectively shape their individual identity and sense of belonging in society. Postmemory enhances a person’s perception of self and belonging within historical contexts, and in relation to specific landscapes, cityscapes, and storied places. As Michel de Certeau pointed out in the essay “Walking in the City” (1984), the search for lost histories spurs members of the postgenerations to visit and experience the places where their parents or grandparents once lived, in order to piece together fragmented memories and broken identities. The personal and collective aspects of postmemory in relation to World War II are key themes in three recent autobiographical graphic memoirs: Jérémie Dres’ We Won’t See Auschwitz (2012), Nora Krug’s Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (2018), and Rutu Modan’s The Property (2013). Dres, Krug, and Modan explore how war trauma is inherited by descendants of the people who actually experienced it: Dres from the point of view of two grandsons of a Polish-Jewish woman, and Krug from the perspective of a granddaughter of a German soldier, while Modan features an Israeli grandmother-granddaughter team, who seeks to reclaim family property in Poland. The paper will analyze specific visual images of how postmemory and the search for lost World War II histories depict the lingering effects of trauma and displacement.