Towards postmemory of hope: the case of Gabriel Josipovici’s In a Hotel Garden
Towards postmemory of hope: the case of Gabriel Josipovici’s In a Hotel Garden

Summary/Abstract: This article analyses Gabriel Josipovici’s novella In a Hotel Garden (1993) in thecontext of Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, introduced in her 1993 article FamilyPictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory, and successively expanded in subsequent publi-cations. Insofar as both the writer and the scholar have their own experience of struggle withthe inherited memory of the Holocaust, their views on the way the lives of the postgenera-tion (i.e., children and grandchildren of survivors of cultural or collective traumatization) areaffected by their ancestors’ trauma appear to differ. While Hirsch concentrates on aestheticrepresentation of trauma transmission, Josipovici aims in his book at rechannelling the idea ofpostmemory into the direction of hope and healing. Interestingly, by doing so Josipovici doesnot oppose Hirsch but anticipates the evolution of her thinking. Gesturing beyond the domi-nating tendency in Holocaust studies, still very much alive today, to perceive the descendantsof Holocaust survivors in terms of “subsequent generations of trauma carriers”, Josipovici’sstance in In a Hotel Garden seems consistent with the results of scientific research according towhich (in)direct contact with trauma may engender a variety of reactions and the link betweenthe horrific experience and subsequent disorders in family members is not deterministic.

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