Introduction

We are used, in the UK, to thinking about the Holocaust in Europe, and the impact that it may have on survivors and members of the Second Generation who seek professional help. The paper which the Journal presents in the second part of our Australian section addresses an experience of the Holocaust at greater distance, both geographically and psychically.

The historian Esther Faye, in ‘“Enjoying” traumatically: the Holocaust as “the Second Generation”’ other', develops ideas initially presented at an international interdisciplinary conference in 1998 in Sydney (Faye 1998). ‘Trauma and Memory: Cross-Cultural Perspectives’, held under the auspices of the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, and the Centre for Women's Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, aimed to explore the variety of languages - verbal, visual and performative -available for the articulation of traumatic memory. The context was the current exploration of the implications that traumatic events have for individual and collective memory, and the recognition of how much critical attention the experience of trauma has attracted in recent years, especially in regard to studies of the Holocaust and child sexual abuse. There were strands on post-Holocaust memory; cinematic responses to trauma, from Hiroshima to the gangsta rap film; the Stolen Generation in Australia; and bodily memory, the strand in which I was speaking.

A conference is an intense space, and it was brought home to me very vividly that an individual who is preoccupied with traumatic memory is part of a culture which is itself preoccupied with trauma and memory - be it in truth and reconciliation commissions, or Holocaust memorial, or contemporary film or art practice, or cultures of regret and apology. The conference brought these themes together; inevitably it staged an encounter between them. It illustrated the intensification of narrative possibilities in cultures that increasingly validate a language of trauma