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Holocaust Representation in Third-Generation Literary Non-Fiction

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Holocaust Representation in Third-Generation Literary Non-Fiction Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte Ayla De Greve Holocaust Representation in Third-Generation Literary Non-fiction: Postmemory in Daniel Mendelsohn‘s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million and Edmund De Waal‘s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance Paper submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde Nederlands – Engels 2013 Supervisor: Dr. Stijn Vervaet Department Literature Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Stijn Vervaet, my research supervisor, for his guidance, encouragements and constructive critiques of this work. I would also like to thank him for recommending the two beautiful novels that are discussed in this paper. Furthermore, I am grateful to Prof. Dr. Philippe Codde, for arousing my interest in the subject of third-generation Holocaust literature during his course ‗Contemporary American Literature‘. Finally, special thanks are extended to my parents for their support and encouragement throughout my study. Abstract This paper deals with Marianne Hirsch‘s concept of postmemory in the context of the Holocaust. Postmemory describes the relationship that the generation after bears to the traumatic experiences that preceded their births, but which were transmitted to them deeply and affectively. This essay focuses on this relationship in the third generation, where postmemory can be seen as an obsession with the inaccessible past of the ancestors. Focusing on non-fictional literature, this paper elucidates how postmemory has influenced the representation of the Holocaust in The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn and The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund De Waal. The novels by these third-generation writers both examine the family history of the authors in the context of the Holocaust. By means of a close reading, this paper examines several aspects related to postmemory in both novels. Table of contents 1. Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 1 2. Postmemory .......................................................................................................................... 3 2.1 What is postmemory? ............................................................................................. 3 2.2 The generation after ................................................................................................ 4 2.3 The first generation ................................................................................................. 6 2.4 The second generation ............................................................................................ 8 2.5 The third generation .............................................................................................. 12 3. Postmemory in Daniel Mendelsohn‘s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million and Edmund De Waal‘s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance ……………………………….... 15 3.1 About the novels ……………………………………………………………….... 15 3.1.1 Daniel Mendelsohn – The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million ……… 15 3.1.2 Edmund De Waal – The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance 17 3.2 Quest …………………………………………………………………………….. 19 3.2.1 Daniel Mendelsohn – The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million ……… 19 3.2.2 Edmund De Waal – The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance 24 3.3 Communicative and cultural memory …………………………………………... 25 3.4 The influence of postmemory on identity ………………………………………. 28 3.4.1 Daniel Mendelsohn – The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million ……… 28 3.4.2 Edmund De Waal – The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance 32 3.5 Representation of postmemorial aspects ………..……………………………… 34 3.5.1 Mediation ……………………………………………………………… 34 3.5.2 Received history ………………………………………………………. 37 3.5.3 Storytelling ……………………………………………………………. 42 3.6 Perpetrators and victims ………………………………………………………… 45 3.6.1 Survivor‘s guilt ……………………………………………………….. 45 3.6.2 Identity of the perpetrator ……………………………………………. 47 3.6.3 The grey zone ………………………………………………………… 50 3.7 The role of photographs in Daniel Mendelsohn‘s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million ………………………………………………………………………………. 52 3.7.1 The effects of photographs on Daniel Mendelsohn …………………… 52 3.7.2 The effects of photographs on the survivors ……..…………………… 55 3.7.3 The effects of photographs on the readers ……………………………. 57 3.8 References to myth in Daniel Mendelsohn‘s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million ................................................................................…………………………. 58 3.9 Testimonial objects in De Waal‘s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance ………………………………………………………………………….. 62 4. Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………….. 66 1. Introduction [T]he Holocaust wasn‘t something that simply happened, but is an event that‘s still happening. – Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million The Holocaust took place over sixty years ago, yet in a way it is still happening. Marianne Hirsch states that ―[t]hese events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present‖ (2012: 5). The more this tragedy recedes from us in time, the more our preoccupation with it increases, it seems (Hoffman 2004: ix). Not only is the Holocaust still an important topic in literature and scholarly work, but also in daily life, the effects of the Shoah can still be palpable. This is the case especially for those who have a ―sense of living connection‖ to the event (xv). Hence, not only the survivors, but also their descendants, who have a living connection to the Holocaust through their parents and grandparents, can be affected by the Holocaust. Indeed, many scholars like Sicher, Hoffman, Schwab and Hirsch have established that ―[a]long with stories, behaviors, and symptoms, parents do transmit to their children aspects of their relationship to places and objects from the past‖ (Hirsch 2012: 213). Thus, as Schwab points out, ―[t]he legacies of violence not only haunt the actual victims but also are passed on through the generations‖ (2010: 1). In this paper, we will focus particularly on members of the third generation, whose grandparents lived during the Holocaust and whose lives and work seem to be affected by this. Since the generation of survivors is starting to pass away, the third generation is highly concerned with preserving their stories. As De Waal points out, ―I am the wrong generation to let it go‖ (2010: 348). Descendants of survivors tend to want to preserve their relatives‘ stories not only to ensure that the Holocaust will not be forgotten, but also to discover and safeguard their own family story, to which they are closely connected. Hirsch describes this close connection to the trauma of their grandparents as ‗postmemory‘. Through stories, behaviours or images, the experiences of the Holocaust were transmitted to them so affectively, ―as to seem to constitute memories in their own right‖ (Hirsch 2012: 5). Writers of the generations after are thus not only concerned with representing their ancestors‘ stories to preserve them, but also with their personal involvement, the way in which the stories were transmitted to them and the way they represent the stories towards the next generations. While Hirsch applied the concept of postmemory on the second generation, Codde and others argue 1 that it is also suitable for the third generation. Codde states that ―[p]ostmemory is an obsession with the opaque and inaccessible past of one‘s parents or grandparents‖ (2009: 64). For third-generation writers Daniel Mendelsohn and Edmund De Waal, this ‗obsession‘ has resulted in a non-fictional novel about their family history. In this paper we will discuss how the issue of postmemory has influenced respectively The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million and The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance. In the first chapter on postmemory, we will define and discuss Marianne Hirsch‘s influential concept of postmemory thoroughly. Afterwards, we will briefly discuss how ‗the generation after‘ became important in scholarly work and we will consider some typical characteristics of the first, second and third generation of Holocaust survivors. In the next chapter, we indulge in a close reading of Mendelsohn‘s The Lost and De Waal‘s The Hare with Amber Eyes. We will analyse how postmemory plays an important role in these non-fictional novels. Firstly, we describe the content of the novels and illuminate why they are considered works of postmemory and thus the subject of this paper. Next, we will argue that both novels are quests, which has an influence on their structure and we will briefly discuss which difficulties the authors came across during the quests. Further on, we examine the difference between cultural and communicative memory and how this is relevant for the novels. After that, the influence of postmemory on the identities of the authors is explored. Subsequently, we deal with the representation of three significant aspects of third-generation writing, which are the issues of mediation and received history, and the way of storytelling. Afterwards, the connection between perpetrator and victim is investigated, by focussing on survivor‘s guilt, the identity of the perpetrator and the grey zone in both books. This is followed by a discussion of the role of photographs in Mendelsohn‘s novel. Their impact on the author himself, on the survivors he interviews and the possible effects on the reader will be central. Next, we will discuss how and why Mendelsohn
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