Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

The work of postmemory is an attempt to animate these structures, to give them body and voice, to revitalize them in accordance with one’s own experience and understanding. This is how Odysseus called forth the souls of the dead, and they flew down in clouds, crying out like birds at the smell of sacrificial blood. He chased them off, allowing only the ones he wished to talk with to come near to the fire. The blood was a prerequisite, no conversation could happen without it. Now to make the dead speak we have to give them space in our own bodies and minds, carry them inside us like the unborn. And yet the burden of postmemory is placed on children’s shoulders: the second and third generations of those who survived and who allow themselves to look back.

Hirsch sets the boundaries of postmemory with deliberate rigor. The term itself was invented for and applied within the field of Holocaust studies, the funneling space that was left in the aftermath of catastrophe. The reality she describes is taken directly from her own personal experience, which continually informs her approach. It’s the day-to-day experience of those whose parents and grandparents measured their history from the catastrophe of European Jewry as once history was calculated from the flood. It can’t be reckoned with, or pushed aside, because it will always be the starting point, the inescapable pretext for their existence. The need to constantly bring forth the memory of events (remembrance as the highest form of posthumous justice) has a particular quality. This knowledge, both inexplicable and unbearable, blinds like a flash of light whichever way you turn away from it. In its glare anything that has no direct relationship with then loses its significance: it has failed the test of the ultimate experience of injustice.

From here comes the unrelenting and troubled magnification of the past in the consciousness of those who are still within its grip. Perhaps those who were allowed to escape their fate feel this more acutely, those who did not pass through the extermination camps, but who were, in Hirsch’s words: “survivors of persecution, ghettoization, and displacement.” The survivor’s situation leads to its own ethical quandary. It’s hard not to feel that the place you occupy in this world could be filled by another, and by rights it should be filled by this destroyed and unfulfilled other life. In The Drowned and the Saved Primo Levi tells us with absolute candor: “The worst survived, that is, the fittest; the best all died.”

Those who weren’t “the best,” those who benefited from geographic and biographical chance, the luck of the draw (as far as luck was possible, then or now), are forced to act according to an invisible imperative. This is not only to strive to be better than you were cut out to be, it has something to do with the constant sense of the world as an apartment that has just been abandoned. The owners are gone and we are left sitting on their orphaned divans, under photographs of strangers, learning to call them family without really having the right to do so.

This unchanging angle of vision, whereby the past inhabits the present, is a particular sort of enchanted state. It has such a powerful effect, like a light filter or sunglasses, sometimes obliterating the present day, sometimes tinting it. The impossibility of saving the already perished makes the gaze particularly intense — if not Medusa, whose stare petrified the disappearing world, turning it into a monument, then Orpheus’s arresting gaze, momentary, photographic, tipping inanimate into animate.

Many people are now occupied by attempts to draw memory out from its hiding places, from the womb-like darkness of “personal history,” and to make it seen and heard. Judging by the numbers of films and books appearing, it’s a comprehensive salvaging operation. Even private love stories have become something like a collective project. Its aim is akin to Hannah Arendt’s description of the difference between the warm accumulation of communities cast out of the world into nonexistence, and the lit public space where the world began. Hirsch describes postmemory not as a project or even a particular type of contemporary sensibility, but as something far broader: “It’s not a movement, method or idea; I see it, rather, as a structure of inter- and transgenerational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience. It is a consequence of traumatic recall but (unlike posttraumatic stress disorder) at a generational remove.”

Postmemory, then, is a kind of internal language, establishing horizontal and vertical lines of transmission (and cutting out those who have no right to speak it). It is, besides this, a petri dish in which reality itself is transformed, changing its colors and its usual affinities. Susan Sontag once described photography in a similar way: “Photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.” Like language, like photography, postmemory is far more than its obvious function. It doesn’t just show us the past, but changes the present, because the past is the key to everything that occurs daily in the present.

The circle of those who are involved in the heat transfer between past and present is much wider than those who feel a link with the history of Europe’s Jews, or with the trauma wound, which makes a tear in time’s matter at the point of no return, the border between then and now. This border, as depicted by familial memory, spoken memory, is too much like the border between the time of innocence and the time of — let’s call it the twilit time. Grandmother’s memories, great-grandmother’s memoirs, great-grandfather’s photographs — all are witnesses of “then,” of the inviolate world, when everything was in its place, and might have remained so if darkness had not descended. In this respect, postmemory is ahistorical, but the very dichotomy of memory and history lives in the air we breathe, and it has become fashionable to prefer one over the other.

Memory is handed down, history is written down; memory is concerned with justice, history with preciseness; memory moralizes, history tallies and corrects; memory is personal, history dreams of objectivity; memory is based not on knowledge, but on experience: compassion with, sympathy for a desperate pain demanding immediate involvement. At the same time the landscape of memory is strewn with projections, fantasies, and misrepresentations — the ghosts of today, with their faces turned to the past. Hirsch writes:

The images already imprinted on our brains, the tropes and structures we bring from the present to the past, hoping to find them there and to have our questions answered, may be screen memories — screens on which we project present, or timeless, needs and desires and which thus mask other images and other, as yet unthought or unthinkable concerns.

In some senses postmemory treats the past as raw material, destined for editing. “Invariably, archival photographic images appear in postmemorial texts in altered form: they are cropped, enlarged, projected onto other images; they are reframed and de- or recontextualized; they are embedded in new narratives, new texts; they are surrounded by new frames.” (Hirsch). In their original form they are akin to food it would be unthinkable to eat raw, before the necessary, complicated, and careful preparation.

The problem is that the petri dish of postmemory — or new memory — is far larger than the circle of things and phenomena informing Hirsch’s work. Because twentieth-century history spread its cataclysms liberally around the globe, most people alive can consider themselves survivors to some extent, the result of a traumatic shift, its victims and the bearers of its legacy, people with something to remember and to call back to life at the expense of their own today. And perhaps also because the world of the living and the world of the dead coexist in exactly this way: we live in their houses, we eat from their plates, but we forget these previous owners, we throw out their fragile reality, putting our own thoughts and hopes in its place, editing and abridging as we see fit, until time sweeps us into that corner where we ourselves become the past.