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4.0
Eva Hoffman’s After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust treads many different areas surrounding the fallout of the Holocaust. At its most basic level, the book is an exploration of the experiences of the second-generation, or the children of Holocaust survivors, of which Hoffman is herself one. Hoffman’s personal experiences are interspersed throughout the work, and her own process of contending with a Holocaust both intimately near and far away comprise the structural form of the book. On a broader scale, however, Hoffman is relating her own experiences in a loose allegory to the experiences of the first generation of baby boomers as a whole, and the ways that Holocaust scholarship has been shaped and molded during their time. The book is, from the start, undergirded by Hoffman’s insistence that this generation, which was uniquely positioned in that it had both intimate knowledge of the Holocaust as a politically recent event, and yet enough distance to be able to engage with it, is coming to an end. Her main concern, therefore, seems to be how to in some way grapple with the fact that the Holocaust slips ever further back into history, as well as determine what the appropriate legacy of this “hinge generation,” which decided whether “the past is transmuted into history or into myth.” (198)
Hoffman’s first two chapters are perhaps the most explicitly personal, and it is in these chapters that Hoffman positions the second-generation. The first chapter focuses on how the Holocaust, for many children of survivors, becomes a fable, full of both sinister and beautiful places and people, yet lacking in any sense of realism because children simply cannot comprehend it. As she says, “Whereas adults who live through violence and atrocity can understand what happens to them as an 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.” (16) The ways that this story is told are multifold; often the children do not hear the stories in words but they are transmitted nonetheless as parents awake from horrid nightmares, engage in strange, paranoiac behaviors, or alternate between struggling to show love and smothering their children. Hoffman iterates that this has deep emotional impacts on children’s psyches as well, often resulting in several types of disorders such as fear of constant disaster or intense feelings of insignificance compared to their parents.
It is in the period of adolescence that Hoffman first relates the experiences of the second-generation with society as a whole, claiming that “the so-called latency period, when the Holocaust seemed to recede from public consciousness, coincided with our own developmental latency” in which the psychic problems of the second generation were not dealt with, but are instead buried in favor of dealing with the day-to-day. (77) For most of this generation, this meant dealing with immigration and the silence surrounding the Holocaust, as well as the strange shift in parental roles, as children who were often more easily able to learn new languages and cultural habits, often had to guide their parents through the new landscape.
Hoffman pinpoints the 1970s as the moment when discussions of the Holocaust began to re-emerge with vigor. It is also at this point that her own narrative becomes broader, as she discusses the trajectory of the study of the Holocaust as a whole. Hoffman discusses her own ambiguous feelings as Holocaust survivors became voguish. (She includes an example of two people at a party attempting to one-up one another with the Holocaust stories of the guests they brought with them.) While she is happy that the Holocaust was able to be discussed and admits that this did provided an excellent space to begin working through the events and several historical insights, she does not see this movement as unambiguously good, either, particularly the shift toward memory and identity politics as they relate to Holocaust research. Both of these elements include a dilution and misunderstanding of what actually occurred in the Holocaust. For instance, on memory, Hoffman states:
This body of thought and the phenomenon sometimes all too smoothly referred to as “memory of the Holocaust” has inspired a body of secondary and tertiary critique, in which it is the responses to the Holocaust (or its “memory”) that are the subject of disputation. In all of this, the Holocaust itself – the Event – can seem very far away, an increasingly abstract point of reference, a pretext for strangely gratifying emotional gestures or curiously abstruse theoretical debates. In other words, in our increasing preoccupation with it, the Holocaust has become a cultural phenomenon. (157)
There is a similar fear that the actualities of the Holocaust are lost in discussions of trauma and identity:
Our rhetoric is ever more pervaded by the professional and sociological vocabulary of victimhood – and in that vocabulary, suffering becomes reified into pathology or aggrandized into martyrdom. Suffering becomes Trauma; a person who has experienced adversity or been treated harshly becomes the Victim. Indeed, it sometimes seems to me that the excesses of identity politics are themselves a kind of displacement, wherein the actualities of suffering are placed at a safe distance and relegated to the sphere of abstract compassion and morality. (276)
Such a belief in trauma and victimization results in what, for Hoffman, are profound misunderstandings not only of the Holocaust, but of present events. For instance, she describes her befuddlement at feelings of many Americans at having “deserved” the 9/11 attacks. She describes this as a form of narcissism, in which Americans are secretly still seeing themselves as the number one aggressor and any one else as their victims, and likewise a result of the “gradual but decisive shift in the postwar decades from the older politics of triumphalism to the politics of trauma, from the belief that victory vindicates to the conviction that victimhood confers virtue.” (259) For Hoffman, the key way to move forward, then, is first, to allow the Holocaust to become something of the past, respectfully minded and available to learn from, but not something acceptable for political use in the present. Historians need to be more understanding of the fact that “even those greatly sinned against are capable of greatly sinning” and it is impossible “to reprieve even those who have been greatly persecuted from the normal responsibilities of life.” (95) We need to be more willing to look closely at Holocaust victims to truly understand them as they were, including their moral flaws. She also says that understanding fanaticism, particularly the conditions under which people are drawn to it, is of fundamental importance in understanding how to prevent such actions in the future. Our key focus should be less about the morality of the Holocaust, which for most people is fairly clearly settled, but in learning what it can teach us about how genocides happen and how they can be prevented in the future.
Ultimately, Hoffman’s account is a masterful account of where research into the Holocaust has been and how it might continue. Although the work is sometimes difficult to follow because it flows so seamlessly between the registers of intense personal account and cultural analysis, this is also one of the strengths of the work. By placing living memory – those children now left to embody the experiences of their Holocaust survivor parents – in dialogue with more abstract broad analysis, Hoffman forcefully shows that just as her own life has changed in complicated and unexpected ways and yet remained intensely her own, so must the research into the Holocaust continue to move forward, all while remembering the real, lived experiences at the heart of it.
Hoffman’s first two chapters are perhaps the most explicitly personal, and it is in these chapters that Hoffman positions the second-generation. The first chapter focuses on how the Holocaust, for many children of survivors, becomes a fable, full of both sinister and beautiful places and people, yet lacking in any sense of realism because children simply cannot comprehend it. As she says, “Whereas adults who live through violence and atrocity can understand what happens to them as an 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.” (16) The ways that this story is told are multifold; often the children do not hear the stories in words but they are transmitted nonetheless as parents awake from horrid nightmares, engage in strange, paranoiac behaviors, or alternate between struggling to show love and smothering their children. Hoffman iterates that this has deep emotional impacts on children’s psyches as well, often resulting in several types of disorders such as fear of constant disaster or intense feelings of insignificance compared to their parents.
It is in the period of adolescence that Hoffman first relates the experiences of the second-generation with society as a whole, claiming that “the so-called latency period, when the Holocaust seemed to recede from public consciousness, coincided with our own developmental latency” in which the psychic problems of the second generation were not dealt with, but are instead buried in favor of dealing with the day-to-day. (77) For most of this generation, this meant dealing with immigration and the silence surrounding the Holocaust, as well as the strange shift in parental roles, as children who were often more easily able to learn new languages and cultural habits, often had to guide their parents through the new landscape.
Hoffman pinpoints the 1970s as the moment when discussions of the Holocaust began to re-emerge with vigor. It is also at this point that her own narrative becomes broader, as she discusses the trajectory of the study of the Holocaust as a whole. Hoffman discusses her own ambiguous feelings as Holocaust survivors became voguish. (She includes an example of two people at a party attempting to one-up one another with the Holocaust stories of the guests they brought with them.) While she is happy that the Holocaust was able to be discussed and admits that this did provided an excellent space to begin working through the events and several historical insights, she does not see this movement as unambiguously good, either, particularly the shift toward memory and identity politics as they relate to Holocaust research. Both of these elements include a dilution and misunderstanding of what actually occurred in the Holocaust. For instance, on memory, Hoffman states:
This body of thought and the phenomenon sometimes all too smoothly referred to as “memory of the Holocaust” has inspired a body of secondary and tertiary critique, in which it is the responses to the Holocaust (or its “memory”) that are the subject of disputation. In all of this, the Holocaust itself – the Event – can seem very far away, an increasingly abstract point of reference, a pretext for strangely gratifying emotional gestures or curiously abstruse theoretical debates. In other words, in our increasing preoccupation with it, the Holocaust has become a cultural phenomenon. (157)
There is a similar fear that the actualities of the Holocaust are lost in discussions of trauma and identity:
Our rhetoric is ever more pervaded by the professional and sociological vocabulary of victimhood – and in that vocabulary, suffering becomes reified into pathology or aggrandized into martyrdom. Suffering becomes Trauma; a person who has experienced adversity or been treated harshly becomes the Victim. Indeed, it sometimes seems to me that the excesses of identity politics are themselves a kind of displacement, wherein the actualities of suffering are placed at a safe distance and relegated to the sphere of abstract compassion and morality. (276)
Such a belief in trauma and victimization results in what, for Hoffman, are profound misunderstandings not only of the Holocaust, but of present events. For instance, she describes her befuddlement at feelings of many Americans at having “deserved” the 9/11 attacks. She describes this as a form of narcissism, in which Americans are secretly still seeing themselves as the number one aggressor and any one else as their victims, and likewise a result of the “gradual but decisive shift in the postwar decades from the older politics of triumphalism to the politics of trauma, from the belief that victory vindicates to the conviction that victimhood confers virtue.” (259) For Hoffman, the key way to move forward, then, is first, to allow the Holocaust to become something of the past, respectfully minded and available to learn from, but not something acceptable for political use in the present. Historians need to be more understanding of the fact that “even those greatly sinned against are capable of greatly sinning” and it is impossible “to reprieve even those who have been greatly persecuted from the normal responsibilities of life.” (95) We need to be more willing to look closely at Holocaust victims to truly understand them as they were, including their moral flaws. She also says that understanding fanaticism, particularly the conditions under which people are drawn to it, is of fundamental importance in understanding how to prevent such actions in the future. Our key focus should be less about the morality of the Holocaust, which for most people is fairly clearly settled, but in learning what it can teach us about how genocides happen and how they can be prevented in the future.
Ultimately, Hoffman’s account is a masterful account of where research into the Holocaust has been and how it might continue. Although the work is sometimes difficult to follow because it flows so seamlessly between the registers of intense personal account and cultural analysis, this is also one of the strengths of the work. By placing living memory – those children now left to embody the experiences of their Holocaust survivor parents – in dialogue with more abstract broad analysis, Hoffman forcefully shows that just as her own life has changed in complicated and unexpected ways and yet remained intensely her own, so must the research into the Holocaust continue to move forward, all while remembering the real, lived experiences at the heart of it.
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