Giving an Account of Inherited Pasts: Memory, Ethics, and Relationality in Postgeneration Memoirs

The aim of this article is to provide a new theoretical and methodological framework for analyzing the ethical, relational, and normative dimensions of transgenerational memory work, taking a comparative close reading of two Norwegian second-generation Holocaust family memoirs, Irene Levin’s Vi snakket ikke om Holocaust (2020) and Bjørn Westlie’s Fars krig (2008), as its case in point. Both narratives are simultaneously biographies, autobiographies, and historiographies, and they mediate between family memory and national memory. The authors position themselves as second-generation descendants, addressing and being addressed by their parents, and as Holocaust researchers, addressing and being addressed by a public audience. Departing from the theoretical perspective of relational life writing and Judith Butler’s concepts “scene of address” and “frameworks of recognition”, this comparative literary analysis of rhetorical situations, genres, and modes of narrating discusses the author-narrators’ engagement with their parents’ silence and writings and reveals how personal histories intersect with collective reckoning. By attending to the relational and performative aspects of storytelling, this article highlights how postgeneration literature enacts ethical reflection, recognition, and accountability.