“What’s Wrong With This Picture?” and “The Generation of Post Memory”- Andrea Edelman
Marianne Hirsch & Leo Spitzer “What’s Wrong With This Picture?”
This reading got me thinking a lot about my own memories, ones that have been passed on from my grandparents to parents and then me, or even memories that I think I have happened to me but when I look back at images, I realize are not necessarily how I remembered them to have happened. Being a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I have no doubt that photographs play an important roll in tracing family histories. Hirsch and Spitzer talk about images as “evidence”, an item we use now to remember something from the past. However, they also note that photographs are both “limited and flawed historical documents, as well as powerful “points of memory” linking past and present” (237). In my grandparents house, there is a hallway of family images from before and after the war. It has always confused me that this hallway encourages me and my cousins to see the family members that did not survive, but when we ask about them, we don’t always get answers. In reading this, I think I have realized that this is possibly because my grandparents don’t have the answers. Photographs can only tell us so much—these pictures provide proof that there were others but the photograph does not present to us their stories from before and after that moment in the image.
Another point that stuck out to me was the idea that you don’t always read more into images unless you have a previous conception about them. Roland Barthes writes, “If I like a photograph, if it disturbs me, I… look at it, I scrutinize it” (235). I guess that if I chose to push and ask more questions about these family members that are unspoken about, it would be only because I know that there was a war that forced them to stay behind and I know that they did not survive.
The last point that intrigued me was the story of Helmut in Seifert’s novel The Dark Room. Helmut photographed a moment of terror during the war, however, he threw out the images because “the medium is simply inadequate, wrong” (239). He feel that the images could not do justice to the feeling that he felt and the things that he saw. So, even though images can be evidence to us, we cant always trust that what we are seeing is a true depiction of what was happening in that moment that the picture was taken.
Marianne Hirsch “The Generation of Post Memory”
This reading made a lot of similar points to Hirsch’s “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” but goes more in depth on the idea that memories and feelings can be passed on through generations. I think that growing up around memories or stories of the war has definitely resonated with me. Hirsch says that for “young children during the war… the past is located in objects, images, and documents, in fragments and traces” (41). In reading this I remembered two stories: the first, of my grandfather who escaped from Belarus at the age of 3, and second, a moment between my mother and I just a few years ago. My grandfather escaped Belarus with his older sister when they were just 3 and 8. There are, I believe, no pictures of them during their escape, but there are documents. Sitting with my grandfather and great aunt one day, we were discussing something about their travel documents but, when my grandfather began to tell a story about something they had been through my great aunt began to correct him and we realized that he had a completely wrong memory of that day for them. Even though there were documents to prove things for them, they are read differently by my grandfather and my great aunt. The second story that came to mind was of my mother correcting me when I told a story about a birthday party I had. I don’t remember the exact fight but in order to prove herself right, she pulled down the photo album, and sure enough, I had remembered it incorrectly.