Missing the “Real” Trace of Trauma: How the Second Generation Remember the Holocaust

For some little time now I have been collecting the testimonies of children of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Australia. What preoccupies me particularly has been to see how psychoanalysis, specifically its Lacanian orientation, could be used to work on a key problematic which has been opened up in the historical work on the Shoah, as a consequence of its engagement with the memories of those who were its witnesses. In one notable articulation of this problematic, Saul Friedländer asked: “The question remains […] whether at the collective level… an event such as the Shoah may, after all the survivors have disappeared, leave traces of a deep memory beyond individual recall, which will defy any attempts to give it meaning” (Friedlander , in Young 1997, 49). James E. Young, in an essay honouring Friedländer's work, contemplates how one might fashion a form of history-telling about the Shoah that could “give meaning” to such traces of the “unremembered” of survivor memory, yet without falling into redemptive forms of representation. Although, Young reflects, we will probably only be left with the second generation's artistic and literary representations of these traces once its survivors have died, he sees one solution to the current problem of how to “includ[e] some oblique reference to such deep memory … which leaves it essentially intact” in the kind of uncanny doubling as survivor and historian practised by Friedländer. In Friedländer's historical work we can hear, according to Young, “the uncanny middle voice of one who is in history and who tells it simultaneously, one who lives in history as well as through its telling” (emphasis in original, Young 1997, 49-50, 53).