Surviving a Distant Past: A Case Study of the Cultural Construction of Trauma Descendant Identity (original) (raw)
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POST-MEMORY: FAMILY AS A SPACE OF HISTORICAL TRAUMA TRANSMISSION
Family stories give the individual a sense of identity and create a story for the inclusion, transmission and attachment of new generations. If we know the past of the family, we can tell the story of how it is. The family features of the past and today are familiar to the individual. New generations depend on the way of movement and discourses of previous generations. While some of these stories are about identity, ethnicity, culture, some are about family history, positive or negative experiences. Traumatic events that family members have witnessed or experienced are transferred to later generations. Traumatically overwhelming, unbearable, unimaginable memories and discourses go beyond social discourse and are passed to the future generations as emotional tenderness or a chaotic urgency. Various theories and methods have been developed to understand and clarify this transmission. Transgenerational transmission studies have come into question with Holocaust studies, first studies on that topic began with the 2nd and 3rd generations of Holocaust survivors. Theories of trauma transmission point some different approaches of how traumatic events experienced by the family transmitted, they are: transgenerational transmission, inter-generational transmission, multigenerational transmission, cross-generational transmission and parental transmission. In 1990, Marianne Hirsch proposed the concept of post-memory as a transgenerational transmission in a work on formation of collective memory of Holocaust. The concept became a fundamental element of memory work, causing a series of debates. According to the theorists who embraced the post-memory conception, there was a need for a specific conceptualization to study the function of traumatic experience transmission through images and stories, to establish the knowledge of experience of later generations. It thus, made possible, to describe a proximal experience or indirect recall from a transgenerational point of view, in which the subjective relationship with the event is preserved. In the last two decades, post-memory was centered on almost all trauma transmission and cultural studies. Not only the next generation of Holocaust survivors, but also dynamics of other societies who were exposed to societal and historical trauma are covered within this concept. This study handles the transgenerational trauma transmission in post-memory theoretical framework. How transmission occurs, what is transmitted to generations, when transmission took place and how this transmission affects future generations are topics of that study.
Trauma and Origins: Post-Holocaust Genealogists and the Work of Memory
Qualitative Sociology, 2009
In the 1970s, as children of Holocaust survivors reached adulthood, many began to excavate, piece together, and re-fashion their fractured family histories. This movement achieved momentum in the 1980s and 1990s, as the so-called “second generation” moved into middle age. Drawing from data gleaned from participant observation on a listserv for children of survivors and from interviews, I argue that those who engage in post-Holocaust genealogy are searching for coherent narratives that place their own origin in the context of the families into which they were born. By seeking, borrowing from and selectively appropriating traces of the past, they are using them as raw material in the production of new stories about the past and, by implication, the present.
Social Science and Medicine, 2019
This study explores the phenomenological experience of the transmitted trauma legacies of Jewish-Israeli Holocaust descendants and their self-perceived sense of vulnerability and resilience. Ethnographic interviews reveal unique local configurations of emotional vulnerability and strength. Respondents normalize and valorize emotional wounds describing them as a "scratch" and as a "badge of honor". This self-depiction challenges the typical profile in the literature of the pathologized and vulnerable descendant. The meaning of the emotional "scratch" is mediated by culturally particular spiritual and moral-political worldviews as well as silent expressions of intergenerational memory that function both as risk and resilience factors for descendants’ distress. The finding that descendants resist binary readings of wellbeing and distress/illness challenges the cross-cultural translation of the resilience construct as a static construct or measure of wellness. Results point to ways that resilience and vulnerability may interact, qualifying one another in the process of meaning making. This concurrent experience of resilience and vulnerability challenges some key assumptions of the regnant “Holocaust model” of pathology in trauma theory.
Trauma, Memory and Identity Crisis: Reimagining and Rewriting the Past
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing , 2022
By dealing with various traumatic events, this volume shows the impact of trauma on the victims’ memory and identity on both individual and collective levels. Bringing together scholars from varying social, cultural, ethnic and political backgrounds, it foregrounds the suffering of the marginalised, thus giving them a narrative, a voice. The book shows the way in which the victims of trauma confront the past, instead of running away from it, share their stories with others, and thus (re)assert their shattered identity. It also highlights the way in which (trauma) narratives can enable the traumatised to challenge official history and to come up with an alternative version of it. Put another way, trauma narratives provide the victims and survivors the opportunity to reimagine, to reinvent and to rewrite the past in order to secure a peaceful future, and help them find a place in history.
TRAUMA, HISTORY, MEMORY, IDENTITY: WHAT REMAINS
History & Theory, 2016
Despite the considerable amount of work already devoted to the topic, the nexus of trauma, history, memory, and identity is still of widespread interest, and much remains to be investigated on both empirical and theoretical levels. The ongoing challenge is to approach the topic without opposing history and memory in a binary fashion but instead by inquiring into more complex and challenging relations between them, including the role of trauma and its effects. This account attempts to set out a research agenda that is multifaceted but with components that are conceptually interrelated and that call for further research and thought. In a necessarily selective manner that does not downplay the value and importance of archival research, it treats both the role of traumatic memory and memory (or memory work) that counteracts post-traumatic effects and supplements, at times serving as a corrective to, written sources. It argues for the relevance to history of a critical but nondismissive approach to the study of trauma, memory, and identity-formation, discussing significant new work as well as indicating the continued pertinence of somewhat older work in the field. One of the under-investigated issues it addresses is the role of the so-called transgenerational transmission of trauma to descendants and intimates of both survivors and perpetrators. It concludes by making explicit an issue that is fundamental to the problem of identity and identity-formation and concerning which a great deal remains to be done: the issue of critical animal studies and its historical and ethical significance. Addressing this issue would require extending one's purview beyond humans and attending to the importance of the relations between humans and other animals. A version of the essay appears in the book UNDERSTANDING OTHERS: PEOPLES, ANIMALS, PASTS (Cornell UP, 2018).
Deviating from foundational assumptions regarding the semiotic and performative role of material objects, mementos of traumatic pasts are conceptualized as resisting mnemonic re-presentation and inter-objectivity. In keeping with trauma discourse, souvenirs of deathworlds are depicted as incapable of encapsulating sublime suffering or breaching the wall of silence between survivors and descendants, failing to constitute a material legacy. Rather than act as conduits for 'continuing bonds' with the past and the dead, survivors are expected to disentangle the self from souvenirs of difficult pasts facilitating separation and recovery. Ethnographic interviews with descendants depict the way discursive framing elides the semiotic potential of domestic material traces of the Holocaust and parent-child-object relations engendering intimate inter-corporeality and embodied memory. Object relations are central in the passage between life-and deathworlds, allowing survivor families to sustain the lived memory of the past in everyday life. Findings problematize the discourse of genocidal suffering that overshadows micro-moments of lived experience.
The grandchildren of war: A transgenerational perspective on traumatic memory Extended abstract
In this paper I analyse the relationship between war trauma and transnational identity. My aim is to show how war trauma experienced by German families during WWII impacts on the identity formation of younger generations, in particular grandchildren with trans-national identity. Data is provided by interviews in Turkey in 2016, on 45 individuals with German mothers and Turkish fathers, aged between 17 and 75. Interviews focus on how members of the wartime generation conveyed their experiences and memories to their grandchildren and how traumatic legacy is interpreted by this transnational third generation. How did the war affect the generation of mothers and grandmothers? How do grand-children interpret these generations' memories of war? The paper thus seeks to understand both how war trauma reconstructed the cultural perspectives of the wartime generation itself, and what role the memory of war plays in the perspective of the third generation. Despite the numerous studies on the direct transmission of traumatic memory and identity, there has been only a limited amount of research on the indirect transmission of traumatic memory across multiple generations. An anthropological perspective is concerned not only with how the memory is recorded, but also how these records are transmitted. My first contribution is to problematize traumatic memory by observing it across three generations. This approach focuses on specifically female agency in the transmission of traumatic heritage / historical trauma. My second contribution is to present the relation between traumatic heritage and cultural identity within a trans-generational framework. Here, it needs to be recalled that the content of traumatic memory concerns not only to what is remembered, but also how those memories are transferred. My third contribution is to show how tendencies caused by wars are reproduced through these transnational identities. As the War unfolded, the experiences of German families formed a kind of family memory. The second generation of German women that came to live in Turkey by marriage to Turkish men reproduced their and their children's war memories, thus reconstructing their identities, even as they tried to leave those memories behind.
Children of Holocaust Survivors: The Experience of Engaging with a Traumatic Family History
Genealogy
This study explored the motivation and the experiences of children of Holocaust survivors who were actively engaged with the traumatic histories of their parents. Our findings are consistent with contemporary views of the intergenerational transmission of the effects of trauma to descendants of Holocaust survivors and reflect a mixture of resilience and vulnerabilities. We interviewed 24 siblings from 11 families who were adult children of Holocaust survivors, alongside the experience of the first author (IK), also a child of Holocaust survivors. An interpretative phenomenological analysis of those interviews identified two overarching themes related to the motivation to gather information about their parents’ stories and their experience of seeking this knowledge. Two themes relate to motivation. The first captured a sense of immersion without choice in the family story emanating from extreme loss and grief and a deep awareness of the communal nature of Jewish history. The second t...