As first-hand testimonies and accounts of the Holocaust fade, scholars and artists alike have struggled to depict and contextualize the genocide’s monumental violence. But depicting violence and its aftermath poses several problems, including the question of how to recall loss without artificially filling
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As first-hand testimonies and accounts of the Holocaust fade, scholars and artists alike have struggled to depict and contextualize the genocide’s monumental violence. But depicting violence and its aftermath poses several problems, including the question of how to recall loss without artificially filling in or effacing the absence so central to its understanding. In essence, remembering the Holocaust is a paradox: the preservation of an absence. Marianne Hirsch’s influential concept of postmemory addresses this paradox and asks questions about memorial capacity in the twenty-first century. This essay considers Hirsch’s postmemory in the context of W.G. Sebald’s 2001 novel
Austerlitz, which uses a combination of prose and photography to engage the difficulties inherent in memory work without access to eyewitnesses. Through the interaction of printed text and images,
Austerlitz subtly references Lurianic mysticism’s concept of
tikkun and Tree of Life (
ilanot) diagrams. The result is a depiction of memory that is both process-based and embodies absence. My reading of
Austerlitz traces a Jewish heritage within the work of a non-Jewish German author by attending to a tradition of mystical thought embedded in the novel. This situates Sebald’s fiction in a much longer Jewish history that stretches out on either end of the event of the Holocaust. Structurally, Sebald develops a
tikkun-like process of (re)creation which relies on gathering material scraps of the past and imaginatively engaging with their absences in the present. Images, just as much as text, are central to this process. Reading
Austerlitz in the context of Kabbalah reveals an intellectual and artistic link to a Jewish history that, while predating the Holocaust, nonetheless sheds light on post-Holocaust memories of loss.
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