Traumatic Entanglement as the Defining Feature of Polish Postmemory Literature

Abstract

This essay examines and summarizes the fundamental characteristics of Polish autobiographical writing by the postmemory generation (i.e., the children of Holocaust survivors), drawing on the concept of postmemory developed by Marianne Hirsch. The article argues that Polish postmemory writing adopts a concept of traumatic entanglement, which represents the condition of the postmemory generation through the unassimilable nature of the Holocaust, while also recognizing other traumas of postwar Poland. According to the argument, the narrative voice of postmemory autobiographical writing is characterized by three aspects: in-choosing, in-positioning, and in-suffering. Through in-choosing, the narrative voice aligns itself with the centrality of the Shoah as the ultimate trauma, which guides the choices not only of the survivor generation, but also of their adult children. In-choosing also becomes the starting point for representing the complexity of the parents’ existence outside the traditional multigenerational model, typical of Jewish culture but destroyed during World War II. Secondly, in-positioning manifests itself in the narrator’s tendency to read the world, and in particular political situations, through the figure of the suffering parent, thus providing a unique perspective. This allows the contemporary reader to understand the individual cost of historical, social, and political changes. Finally, the narrator’s use of in-suffering highlights the events of March 1968 through the persistence of anti-Semitism and the danger inherent in the process of nationalizing the memory of World War II in Poland. Thanks to these three characteristics, postmemory autobiographical writing manages to recode narratives into personal stories of a reparative nature and endowed with transformative power, counteracting both historical amnesia and distortions of memory, and thus anti-Semitism.