After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the HolocaustAs the Holocaust recedes in time, the guardianship of its legacy is being passed on from its survivors and witnesses to the next generation. How should they, in turn, convey its knowledge to others? What are the effects of a traumatic past on its inheritors? And what are the second-generation's responsibilities to its received memories? In this meditation on the long aftermath of atrocity, Eva Hoffman -- a child of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust with the help of neighbors, but whose entire families perished -- probes these questions through personal reflections, and through broader explorations of the historical, psychological, and moral implications of the second-generation experience. She examines the subterranean processes through which private memories of suffering are transmitted, and the more willful stratagems of collective memory. She traces the "second generation's" trajectory from childhood intimations of horror, through its struggles between allegiance and autonomy, and its complex transactions with children of perpetrators. As she guides us through the poignant juncture at which living memory must be relinquished, she asks what insights can be carried from the past to the newly problematic present, and urges us to transform potent family stories into a fully informed understanding of a forbidding history. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 26
Page xii
... atrocity; and that children of survivors' very personal transactions with the past are a strong clue to the problems we must grapple with if we would grasp the meanings and consequences of historical horror. In their mediated but ...
... atrocity; and that children of survivors' very personal transactions with the past are a strong clue to the problems we must grapple with if we would grasp the meanings and consequences of historical horror. In their mediated but ...
Page xiv
... atrocity , or a cross- cultural understanding of , say , ethnic conflict , or reactions to human catastrophe , can illuminate the broader sources and pat- terns of such events . Finally , this book is also the result of conversations I ...
... atrocity , or a cross- cultural understanding of , say , ethnic conflict , or reactions to human catastrophe , can illuminate the broader sources and pat- terns of such events . Finally , this book is also the result of conversations I ...
Page xv
... Shoah with a sense of a living connection. This is one person's meditation on such questions, and on a long reckoning with the long after- math of atrocity. I FROM EVENT TO FABLE In the beginning was the xv iNTRoDUCTioN.
... Shoah with a sense of a living connection. This is one person's meditation on such questions, and on a long reckoning with the long after- math of atrocity. I FROM EVENT TO FABLE In the beginning was the xv iNTRoDUCTioN.
Page 16
... atrocity can understand what happens to them as actuality—no matter how awful its terms— the generation after receives its first knowledge of the terrible events with only childish instruments of perception, and as a kind of fable. It ...
... atrocity can understand what happens to them as actuality—no matter how awful its terms— the generation after receives its first knowledge of the terrible events with only childish instruments of perception, and as a kind of fable. It ...
Page 23
... atrocity , after all , took place right there . the And so the Holocaust was not denied , but it was not yet dis- entangled from other events , not yet framed as the central hor- ror of the war , a separate category of crime against ...
... atrocity , after all , took place right there . the And so the Holocaust was not denied , but it was not yet dis- entangled from other events , not yet framed as the central hor- ror of the war , a separate category of crime against ...
Contents
II From Fable to Psyche | 31 |
III From Psyche to Narrative | 75 |
IV From Narrative to Morality | 101 |
V From Morality to Memory | 149 |
VI From Memory to the Past | 201 |
VII From the Past to the Present | 235 |
Selected Bibliography | 281 |
Acknowledgments | 293 |
Index | 295 |
Other editions - View all
After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust Eva Hoffman Limited preview - 2005 |
After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust Eva Hoffman Limited preview - 2005 |
After Such Knowledge: A Meditation on the Aftermath of the Holocaust Eva Hoffman No preview available - 2017 |
Common terms and phrases
adult aftermath American annihilationist anti-Semitism atrocity Auschwitz become behavior caust childhood children of survivors collective concentration camps conflict consciousness course Cracow cultural death emigration emotional Eva Hoffman experience extreme fate father fear feel felt genocide German groups guilt happened Holo horror Hryczko human idea identity images imagination Israel Israeli Jedwabne Jedwabne massacre Jewish Jews kind knowledge legacy lives loss Majdanek massacre matter meanings memory ments mind moral mother mourning murder narratives Nazi one’s pain parents past people’s perhaps perpetrators persecuted Peter Sichrovsky Poland Poles Polish Polish-Jewish political post-Holocaust postwar prejudice psyche psychic psychological questions realities relation remember response Rwanda Rwandan genocide Second World War second-generation seemed sense September 11 Shoah shtetl sister sometimes Soviet stories suffering survived sympathy things thought tion trauma turn understand victims violence vivors W. G. Sebald wabne witness Załośce