'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

chimney and an industrial oven inside, in front of which they rest for the night. The tale
is briefly interrupted when Lene is accosted and raped by two American soldiers while
leaving the abandoned factory. Lene finishes recounting the tale to Anna, as they sit on
the car of a freight train.
In the context of a film set during the “Third Reich,” images of a smokestack, an
abandoned factory, ovens, and a freight train would suggest the events of the Holocaust
to a viewer familiar with recent German history. One cannot claim with certainty that
these images would cause the viewer to directly „remember‟ the Holocaust. When the
film premiered in 1980 a substantial number of viewers would have been born after the
events of the Second World War and the Holocaust had taken place. This would be even
more so the case with viewers of Deutschland, bleiche Mutter today. Thus, such images
would evoke in many audience members what Marianne Hirsch has termed a
„postmemory‟ of the Holocaust. Hirsch uses the term to describe the situation of a
generation that has not lived through traumatic events of the past directly, but
nevertheless feels strongly connected to and influenced by these events. She states:
In my reading, postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational
distance and by history from a deep personal connection. Postmemory is a
powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to
its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an
imaginative investment and creation. (Family Frames 22)
Hirsch developed the notion of postmemory in relation to children of Holocaust
survivors. In a 2001 essay entitled “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the
Work of Postmemory,” Hirsch examines the repetition in scholarly and popular literature
of a select canon of iconographic images of the Holocaust. She locates the compulsive
replication of emblematic images such as the photograph of the entrance to Auschwitz I
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