Researcher offers reflection on trauma and historical suffering of Jewish communities

Professor Marianne Hirsch, daughter of Holocaust survivors, delivered the 8th FAPESP Lecture 2024 on “Rethinking Holocaust Postmemory After October 7”.

By José Tadeu Arantes  |  Agência FAPESP – The political use of trauma to justify new forms of violence was the central theme of the 8th FAPESP Lecture 2024, “Rethinking Holocaust Postmemory After October 7”, delivered by Marianne Hirsch, Professor Emerita at Columbia University in New York City and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Held amid a dangerous escalation of hostilities in the Middle East, her talk included a critique of what she called the ideological weaponization of the memory of the Holocaust.

Born in Romania to parents who survived the Shoah (Hebrew שואה, meaning “catastrophe”), the mass murder of over 6 million Jews by Nazis and Fascists during World War Two (1939-45), Hirsch is a leading scholar in memory studies and the author of many books, including The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012).

She began by referring to the deterioration in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on October 7, 2023, to contextualize her topic. “As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, I’m deeply disturbed to see how the Holocaust and my own family’s persecution and suffering during the Second World War are being used by apologists of the Israeli State as an alibi for brutal violence against the people of Gaza, over 40,000 of whom have now been killed, including tens of thousands of civilians and notably children,” she said.

Hirsch stressed that the instrumentalization of historical Jewish trauma and suffering is not a new phenomenon. “Prominent Jewish survivors and intellectuals such as Jean Améry, Zygmunt Bauman and Hannah Arendt condemned the use of the memory of the Holocaust for Israel’s political purposes as early as the 1950s,” she said. Moreover, “Israeli politicians and media have repeatedly and increasingly equated Hamas with Nazis and called Palestinians ‘human animals’, thus recalling Nazi rhetoric against Jews.”

Adding more elements for reflection, Hirsch argued that the scholarship and pedagogy of Holocaust memory have reinforced a model of victimization that has been perpetuated down the generations, suggesting that excessive emphasis on suffering has obscured other ways of remembering and transmitting history. “Could it be, I want to ask, that this trauma-driven memory culture that the field of Holocaust studies enabled might at least be partially responsible for what we’re seeing since last October: hyperbolically publicized fears of rampant antisemitism and thus of a returning Holocaust?” she said.

Hirsch went on to say that the field of memory studies has shifted significantly in recent decades, as it has “come to acknowledge deep traumatic injuries left by numerous painful histories in different parts of the world – diverse histories of enslavement, colonialism, racism, dictatorship, war and genocide”. Although reflection on the Holocaust remains an ever-present subject, the field is now focusing on methodologies that manage to relate distinct historical catastrophes all the while giving each its own specificity. “In the memory studies, the centrality of the Holocaust has now largely given way to comparative multidirectional and connective methodologies,” told Hirsch. “These broader perspectives and comparative methodologies have also come to modulate the scope of traumatic repetition and return. They’ve left openings for accounts of individual and collective healing, activist resistance, and possibilities of cultural repair.”

Hirsch revisited the concept of “postmemory”, which she herself fashioned to describe the second generation’s relationship with the traumatic events experienced by their parents but not directly by them. “I’m also thinking of the powerful ways in which trauma can be transmitted across multiple generations and how that has enabled many to claim that to inherit the legacy of the Holocaust in the second, third and subsequent generations is to suffer a transgenerational trauma,” she said.

For Hirsch, this “transgenerational contagion” tends to “perpetuate a culture of defense, racialized inequality, nativism, and ethnocentrism”, all of which “can only lead to more violence”. Constant evocation of the trauma of the Shoah to justify the actions of the State of Israel risks distorting the true legacy of the Holocaust survivors. “The memory of the Holocaust may be useful at this moment, but this will only be true if we refuse to let our histories be used as an alibi for war and destruction,” she said.

She also stressed that the Holocaust cannot be treated as an isolated case or superior to other historical atrocities, such as the Nakba (Arabic النكبة, “catastrophe”), the violent expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians (about three-quarters of the total) from their homes in 1948 and the destruction of over 500 villages. She referred to the thought of Palestinian intellectual Edward Said on the instrumentalization of memory in political contexts and how fear of the past can shape perceptions of the present. “Thinking about the connections between memories and postmemories of the Holocaust and the Nakba is essential to what Said called ‘bases for coexistence’,” she said.

The Holocaust should not be seen exclusively as a symbol of suffering. “If we only remember the Holocaust as extreme trauma, then when the State of Israel is presented as a place of redemption for Jewish suffering, this very suffering becomes an alibi that authorizes violence and destruction,” she said. Holocaust memory must be used to promote justice and solidarity, especially for Palestinians whose lives have been destroyed. “We Jews who live with the legacy of the Shoah have the responsibility of using this legacy to promote justice and solidarity.”

Professor Hirsch revisited the concept of “postmemory”, which she originally fashioned to describe the second generation’s indirect relationship with the traumatic events experienced directly by their parents (photo: Daniel Antônio/Agência FAPESP)

The lecture was preceded by remarks from Fernando Menezes de Almeida, FAPESP’s Chief Administrative Officer. Fernando Ferreira Costa, who chairs the organizing committee for the FAPESP Lectures and the FAPESP Schools of Interdisciplinary Science, also attended the event, which was introduced by Esther Império Hamburger, full professor at the University of São Paulo’s School of Communications and Arts (ECA-USP), Vice Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC-USP), and a member of the organizing committee. The discussant was Márcio Seligmann-Silva, full professor at the State University of Campinas’s Institute for Language Studies (IEL-UNICAMP).

Introducing Professor Hirsch, Hamburger said: “I identify deeply with Marianne’s work, among other things for family reasons. My father [physicist Ernst Hamburger] was born in 1933 in Berlin into a Jewish family and came to Brazil when he was three. He grew up here. He was very proud of Brazil and considered himself Brazilian. He married my mother [physicist Amélia Império], who was from a Catholic family. I’m the daughter of a mixture and of the ideal of coexistence and tolerance”.

Seligman-Silva noted that he too is a descendant of Holocaust survivors. The Shoah has long been thought about as if it were a “crypt”, he said. “To some extent, the Shoah has been remembered cryptically, as if it were encased in a cocoon, disconnected from history, from the longue durée espoused by Fernand Braudel, from a more universal history, although from the word go thinkers like Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt, as well as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and many others after World War Two, sought to think of the Shoah in this context of the longue durée, this more international context, rather than as an encysted, highly personal and familial memory, which led to this model of history that justifies the violence and genocide we’re seeing now.”

And he continued: “I glean from Marianne’s talk the idea of putting memory studies and Holocaust studies beyond trauma. Not that trauma should be abandoned, but that the times require thinking beyond this traumatization in series. As she said, we’re not second-generation survivors. We’re from new generations and the descendants of people who survived. This question of remodeling the concept of postmemory, which she proposed some time ago, entails thinking that we’re now going to move beyond this traumatic repetition. Arendt insisted on the relationship between the Holocaust and imperialism, between the Holocaust and colonial violence. She remarked that the Nazi generals were trained in colonial Africa. Establishing these relationships is therefore fundamental if we’re going to stop thinking of the Holocaust as absolutely unique, as we need to do in order to avert these terrible consequences.”

In the 8th FAPESP Lecture 2024, Marianne Hirsch offered a necessary reflection on how historical memory can be used in constructive and destructive ways. In a critical analysis of transgenerational trauma, she highlighted the need for new approaches that promote healing instead of perpetuating cycles of violence and issued an urgent appeal for memory to be used to build a future of peace and mutual understanding.

The 8th FAPESP Lecture 2024, “Rethinking Holocaust Postmemory After October 7”, can be watched in its entirety at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJGBDlHHvpM.