'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

with its ironic “Arbeit macht frei” or “Work will make you free” sign in the postmemory
of the second generation to the trauma of the first. She argues that “compulsive and
traumatic repetition connects the second generation to the first by producing rather than
screening the effect of trauma that was lived” (Hirsch, “Images” 8). Drawing on the
work of art historian Jill Bennett, Hirsch suggests that photographs of traumatic events
can convey an emotional or bodily experience by evoking the viewer‟s own emotional
and bodily memories. The photographs create an affect in the viewer, speaking from the
body‟s sensation (Hirsch, “Images” 15). Hirsch writes, “This connection between
photography and bodily or sense memory can perhaps account for the power of
photographs to connect first- and second-generation subjects in an unsettling mutuality
that crosses the gap of genocidal destruction” (Hirsch, “Images” 15).
To Hirsch‟s discussion of photographs as the main catalysts of postmemory, I
would like to add my personal observation that documentary film footage, radio
broadcasts, and the iconography of political regimes can also trigger second-generation
memories of collective traumatic experiences. As I have discussed in Chapter 2,
Sanders-Brahms intercuts into her fictional narrative images and sounds that have come
to signify the archive of the German war and post-war experience. She employs
postmemories, in my broader understanding of the term, in the form of archival footage
of Allied bombing raids, urban ruins, and shots of Trümmerfrauen along with radio
broadcasts of Hitler‟s speeches in order to historically and politically contextualize the
action of her dramatic narrative. Further, she uses images of Nazi iconography to similar
effect. For example, in the introductory scene of Deutschland, bleiche Mutter, the Nazi
swastika flag is overwhelmingly present and it places the action of the enacted story in
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