In the course of the last twenty-five years, memory has replaced identity and ideology as the most prominent analytical category in the humanities and social sciences. In scholarly and popular discourses, the occupation with memory has, as Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche described it, almost amounted to an “obsession.”1 At the same time, proponents of memory studies have developed increasingly sophisticated concepts and approaches, further reflecting the ongoing skepticism toward conventional historical narratives.
The work of Marianne Hirsch, who holds a chair in comparative literature and gender studies at Columbia University, exemplifies the field’s increasing sophistication. Hirsch is best known for the conceptualization of postmemory, which she first introduced in the early 1990s and developed further in subsequent studies such as Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (1997) and Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010).2 Her latest book, The Generation of Postmemory,...
