Marianne Hirsch

Marianne Hirsch coined the term 'postmemory', and talked about it in relation to Boltanski's work. Postmemory describes how memories are inherited by the second generation after a traumatic event; their transmittance is so strong that they constitute memories in their own right, even though they happened before their births and are in fact their parents’ memories. Hirsch developed this notion in relation specifically in relation to children of Holocaust survivors; but believes the theory can be transferred to other second generation memories of traumatic events. The children of Holocaust survivors have their own memories of the trauma, even though it was the experiences of their parents; due to the passing on of information and images the memories become the child’s own. Hirsch is interested in how we remember this traumatic event; often recalling familiar images that we have seen through photography, film, television, art and cultural artefacts. Even more widely, I think the holocaust has come to be something that we all remember, even those of us that have no personal relationship to it, through the documentation and photography we still see.