Abject Legacies: Guilt, Shame, and Transgenerational Trauma

Abstract

The wide-reaching impact of trauma, defined most generally as a delayed, uncontrolled, and repetitious response to an overwhelming event, has been studied in individuals for over a century. Yet the effects of transgenerational trauma, or trauma passed affectively through generations, are just beginning to be explored. In the humanities, transgenerational trauma has garnered significant interest, especially Marianne Hirsch’s popular notion of “postmemory.” Postmemory was initially formulated to describe the experiences of children of Holocaust survivors. The discourse around postmemory and transgenerational trauma has followed Hirsch’s impetus and focused almost exclusively on descendants of trauma victims. Very little scholarly attention has been paid to descendants of trauma perpetrators or bystanders even though histories of wartime trauma, guilt, and shame exist in these families and impact descendants. This dissertation explores how descendants of perpetrators relate to the past and, equally importantly, imagine their own position of responsibility. It examines the extent to which postmemory and other similar concepts in trauma theory can be productively applied to descendants of perpetrators of both the Holocaust and other historical tragedies. This dissertation considers legacies of perpetration in autobiographical and semi-autobiographical literature and film of second- and third-generation writers in three perpetrator nations engaged in projects of coming to terms with a criminal Nazi past: Germany, Austria, and Argentina. An analysis of the poetry and prose (1990-2014) of the German writer Ulrike Draesner follows an introduction and clarification of methodological framework. Draesner's family straddles the roles of victim and perpetrator as expellees from former German territories in the east and her practice of life-writing negotiates her sense of responsibility through the fictionalization of her family history. The third chapter focuses on the Argentine Lucía Puenzo’s 2013 film, Wakolda, which deals with Argentina’s postwar harboring of Nazi criminals as well as the enduring legacy of the Dirty War. The film explores Puenzo’s aesthetic and personal positionality as daughter of filmmaker and Dirty War bystander Luis Puenzo. The dissertation concludes with an analysis of Austrian Gerhard Roth’s autofictional account of postwar Austria, Das Alphabet der Zeit (2007). Roth offers a melancholic meditation on his childhood relationship with his parents, two former NSDAP members. He delivers a harsh indictment of his parents’ consistent refusal to accept their responsibility and atone for their actions. According to Roth’s account, his parents’ misdeeds left a permanent stain on his sense of self. Feelings of guilt and uneasiness manifest as physical maladies.