The Generation of Postmemory

the absence of a bodily identity with her mother, Karpf, like Sethe, risks losing her sense of herself

Memory is transmitted to be repeated and reenacted, not to be worked through

Anne Karpf’s relationship to her mother becomes incorporative and appropriative—more a form of “transposition” than identification.

divest myself of my skin, slip out of it

enumerates the bodily symptoms through which she experiences her mother’s sense memories of the camps

Within the intimate familial space of mother/daughter transmission, however, postmemory always risks sliding into rememory, traumatic reenactment, and repetition.

the disavowal of this bodily mirroring.

postgeneration’s ambivalent wish to locate parental trauma in a precise spot

the necessity and the impossibility of receiving the parents’ bodily experience of trauma

The mark of untranslatability becomes the untranslatability of the mark