Towards postmemory of hope: the case of Gabriel Josipovici's In a Hotel Garden

Abstrakt

This article analyses Gabriel Josipovici’s novella In a Hotel Garden (1993) in the context of Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, introduced in her 1993 article Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory, and successively expanded in subsequent publications. Insofar as both the writer and the scholar have their own experience of struggle with the inherited memory of the Holocaust, their views on the way the lives of the postgeneration (i.e., children and grandchildren of survivors of cultural or collective traumatization) are affected by their ancestors’ trauma appear to differ. While Hirsch concentrates on aesthetic representation of trauma transmission, Josipovici aims in his book at rechannelling the idea of postmemory into the direction of hope and healing. Interestingly, by doing so Josipovici does not oppose Hirsch but anticipates the evolution of her thinking. Gesturing beyond the dominating tendency in Holocaust studies, still very much alive today, to perceive the descendants of Holocaust survivors in terms of “subsequent generations of trauma carriers”, Josipovici’s stance in In a Hotel Garden seems consistent with the results of scientific research according to which (in)direct contact with trauma may engender a variety of reactions and the link between the horrific experience and subsequent disorders in family members is not deterministic.