Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography and the Holocaust - Review

Afterimage, May-June, 1999 by Marita Sturken

by Andrea Liss Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998 152 pp./$22.00 (sb)

The nature of history, the practice of historicization and the processes of memory pose special problems for postmodern thought. While postmodern and poststructuralist thought have often been simply characterized as negating history, they can actually be seen as deeply engaged with the question of how to understand our relationship to the past. Particularly central to late twentieth-century thought are the questions of how we remember and what is rendered as history amid an understanding of the role played by the image in mediating memory and history. Documentary photographs, family photographs, television and film images and the personal expression inherent in painting, photography and installation are forms through which we mediate our histories, both personal and cultural.

If modernism believed the image of the past to be a trace of reality, a form through which the past could be reexperienced and memories relived, postmodernism allows no such easy reverie. The relationship of images to the past has become problematic and the role of the image in producing memory and allowing for forgetting is central to this shift. The origin of this change toward an ironic view of the past and its representations can be seen to have been given its most symptomatic invocation in two primary texts: Theodor Adorno's famous statement that "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric"(l) and Roland Barthes's analysis of the image in Camera Lucida as both shock and death, in which he asks "Is History not simply that time when we were not born?"(2) Adorno's statement, with its implication that the horror of the Holocaust made aesthetic representation deeply problematic, has haunted theoretical work about the conflict of memory and history and of fact and fiction in relationship to the Holocaust. Barthes influenced a broad range of work on the role of the photograph in depicting and producing the past as a means to deconstruct identity and as counter-memory.

Marianne Hirsch's Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Andrea Liss's Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography & the Holocaust and Ernst van Alphen's Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory each offer complex and useful new ways to understand our desire for and mediation of memory and history. Indeed, all three authors arrive at the conclusion that traditional forms of history will not provide an understanding of the past. Instead, they embrace nontraditional, formerly delegitimated forms such as autobiography, visual arts, personal and family photographs and historical comic books as means to examine past experiences and retell history. While Liss and van Alphen examine the relationship of the documentary and the artistic, or to use van Alphen's term, the "imaginary," specifically relating to the Holocaust, Hirsch is concerned with the role of family pictures in the construction of individual and familial identity and as a means through which the past, including the traumatic events of the Holocaust, is negotiated, framed and reframed.

Hirsch uses the term "postmemory" as a means to understand the complexities not only of the memories of the children of survivors, but the process of cultural memory itself. She argues that postmemory is related to issues of the diaspora and temporal and spatial exile; it is an essential means to understanding memory precisely because it is

distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. Postmemory 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.

Postmemory is about the continuation of memory and its regeneration in those for whom memories are experienced once or twice removed. Liss, who also employs the term, uses it to refer to "the artists' distance from the events as well as their relation to the fallout of the experiences." It could be said that these authors see artistic engagements of postmemory as offering compelling means to reexamine not only the ways in which the past is understood, represented and mediated, but to reconsider the past itself.

While the question of the incommunicability of modern experience and representation was often posed by modernism, albeit with the assumption that such communication and representation were still possible goals, the Holocaust as an event forced a dramatic shift in notions of what is representable and communicable. Walter Benjamin wrote mournfully of the effects of the mechanical terror of World War I on the capacity to tell stories or to render an experience communicable precisely because of the profound change that war caused in the European experience of modernity - from one of optimism to one of terror and destruction.(3) Yet it is the Holocaust that has been largely understood in western thought as the primary event for which representation is always inadequate or impossible. This has been debated extensively, in particular its relationship to other traumatic events and genocides of the twentieth century, yet it seems clear that the horror of this event, with its industrialization of death, marks a shift in the Euro-American world view, one that can be characterized as a questioning of modernist tenets precisely because of the inconceivable nature of its death and destruction. Hence the Holocaust has been seen as a topic too volatile, too sacred and too unimaginable, its representations subject to stringent moral codes. How then can we interpret the immense outpouring of works in literature, art and popular culture that have attempted to make sense of this event, of the brutality, the obliteration of whole communities, the bureaucratization of death and the capacity to survive? How can we deal with Adorno's statement that after Auschwitz it is barbaric to continue writing poetry? One could read it as profoundly disabling in that it renders all attempts at interpretation of the Holocaust as suspicious. Yet one can also see how this statement forced an examination of the question of representation in general and helped lead to a quest for new, non-modernist forms of engagement with history and memory.