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. |
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Page 13
... suffering. Or rather, perhaps it is more accurate to say that the early awareness of suffering created an unconscious, or preconscious, ethics, and that in this system, just as war was the ground of being, so pain was the ground of ...
... suffering. Or rather, perhaps it is more accurate to say that the early awareness of suffering created an unconscious, or preconscious, ethics, and that in this system, just as war was the ground of being, so pain was the ground of ...
Page 14
... suffering, its untouchable, dark delicacy, because, with a childish receptivity, I absorbed my parents' unhappiness through channels that seemed nearly physical. The pain of their psyches reverberated in my body almost as if it were ...
... suffering, its untouchable, dark delicacy, because, with a childish receptivity, I absorbed my parents' unhappiness through channels that seemed nearly physical. The pain of their psyches reverberated in my body almost as if it were ...
Page 22
... suffering remarked. This is also true in films such as The Last Stage, an account of life in the women's barracks at Auschwitz, made on the site of the camp by two women filmmakers (one of them Jewish, the other most probably not) who ...
... suffering remarked. This is also true in films such as The Last Stage, an account of life in the women's barracks at Auschwitz, made on the site of the camp by two women filmmakers (one of them Jewish, the other most probably not) who ...
Page 25
... suffer through them, experience their impact directly. Our relationship to them has been defined by our very “post-ness,” and by the powerful but mediated forms of knowledge that have followed from it. It is perhaps simply this that ...
... suffer through them, experience their impact directly. Our relationship to them has been defined by our very “post-ness,” and by the powerful but mediated forms of knowledge that have followed from it. It is perhaps simply this that ...
Page 34
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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 cultural death emigration emotional Eva Hoffman experience extreme fate father feel felt generation’s genocide German groups guilt happened Holo Holocaust horror Hryczko human I. F. Stone idea identity images imagination Israel Israeli Jedwabne Jedwabne massacre Jewish Jews kind knowledge legacy lives loss Majdanek massacre matter meanings memory ment mind moral mother mourning murder narratives Nazi one’s pain parents past people’s perhaps perpetrators persecuted Peter Osnos Poland Poles Polish Polish-Jewish political post-Holocaust postwar prejudice psyche psychic psychological questions realities relation remember response Rwanda Rwandan genocide second-generation seemed sense September 11 Shoah shtetl sister sometimes Soviet stories suffering survived sympathy things tion trauma Trial of Socrates turn understand victims violence vivors wabne Załosce