Projected Memory essays

Projected Memory essays The essay Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs, by Marianne Hirsch, is about postmemory. Postmemory is a term that Hirsch has coined. It is memory that is not the product of direct or lived experience but that is produced by the stories and images that circulate from one generation to the next, evidenced in the ways children remember the memories of their parents (Bartholomae 399). It focuses on how children of Holocaust survivors remember the Holocaust through there parents ordeals and stories. The essay by Hirsch is constructed in a way so that different peoples stories and experiences are told so that they represented in postmemories. It is constructed this way to give support to what Hirsch is writing about, postmemories. Every passage deals with the postmemories about the Holocaust. If it was written any other way it would have been extremely difficult to paint such a clear picture of postmemories. The style of the essay was necessary for the argument represented by the essay to work. With out it, it would have been nearly impossible for it to show you the difference seen in a picture if you look at it as a past memory, even if its not a memory of your own, and not as history. The passages of the essay takes you through the pictures as if it was you in the picture. You learn how adult viewers see the child victim through the eyes of his or her own child self (Hirsch 413). Pictures of different children victims of the Holocaust are shown and described in great detail. The first picture is of a little boy in the middle of the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. It is described by Jaroslaw Rymkiewicz so that it makes you feel that you are the little boy or at least standing next to him. Another photograph work is Past Lives, by Lorie Novak, in which it is made up of three different pictures. The foreground picture is made of a picture of little Jewish children hidden in a Fre...