Abstract
Recent postmemory works register the transgenerational effects of trauma in the wake of the Second World War. This chapter examines how Treichel’s Lost, Spiegelman’s Maus II and Overath’s Nahe Tage describe the psychological effects of replacement in children who, in the eyes of their parents, stand in for a lost child or a lost home. While cognisant of specific historical legacies that locate the parents’ trauma within the spectrum of the victim-perpetrator imaginary, these texts articulate commonalities in the ways replacement children are implicated in a history of perpetration that haunts them in the form of psychosomatic symptoms. They locate the irreducible charge assigned to each individual in the historical texture, yet challenge reductive subject positions, such as perpetrator and victim, along with the conception of the implicated subject.
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Notes
- 1.
In Baackmann 2016, I explore the complexities of an implicated subject position in my reading of Rachel Seiffert’s text ‘Lore’. This text is part of Seiffert’s story trilogy The Dark Room (2001), which was adapted for cinema by Cate Shortland in 2012.
- 2.
All translations from Nahe Tage are mine.
References
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Baackmann, S. (2018). Replacement as personal haunting in recent postmemory works. In: Owen, J., Segal, N. (eds) On Replacement. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76011-7_19
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