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Published online: 15 November 2022
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2022
Stephen Frosh’s Those Who Come After makes clear from the outset that denial must be countered with witnessing, remaining vigilant, and that witnessing must be tied to a demand for justice. The terms of this living response to suffering, to atrocity, are not always easy to explain, and we should not be surprised that this book moves among a series of concerns without offering a simple summary of its aims. Although the book endeavors to speak to aftermaths of destruction that many communities have suffered, it is clearly written from the perspective of a Jew who did not directly experience the Nazi genocide but has had to reckon with their historical responsibility, who wonders what witnessing means for them. Despite the temporal distance, they are tied to those events, and yet, what is the nature of that tie?
The idea of “postmemory” is central to this predicament and struggle: “things keep coming back because they continue to have living effects, affecting contemporary subjects not just as ‘history’ but as ‘memory’ too.” Frosh draws upon this important formulation by Marianne Hirsch that recasts memory as counter-history, understood as the tracking of “power structures animating forgetfulness, oblivion, and erasure” that is part of “engag[ing] in acts of repair and redress” (p. 17). On the one hand, Frosh addresses in fresh terms the intergenerational transfer of trauma, the hauntings that pervade those who live on. On the other hand, the text addresses the intergenerational matrix of responsibility which turns out to emerge from a postmemory predicament, that is, a living experience both haunted and ethically responsive. The one who witnesses is implicated in what one sees precisely because that history does not quite end when the acts of destruction are properly documented, for the acts of destruction keep acting on those who remain. To witness is to be impinge