Transgenerational Transmission of Holocaust Trauma and Its Expressions in Literature

Abstract

Trauma is a central concept in the historiography of the Holocaust. In both the historiographical and the psychoanalytical research on the subject, the Holocaust is perceived not as a finite event that took place in the past, but as one that continues to exist and to affect the families of survivors and the Jewish people. In the 1950s⁻1960s, evidence began emerging that Holocaust trauma was not limited to the survivors themselves, but was passed on to the next generation born after the Holocaust and raised in its shadow. It is possible to see the effects of growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust and transgenerational transmission of trauma in many aspects of the second-generation children’s lives. In this article, I examine the representations of these symptoms in David Grossman’s novel See Under: Love, which deals with the subject of the Holocaust through the perspective of Momik, a child of Holocaust survivors. Grossman teaches us that writing itself has the potential to heal. He also shows us that every one of us contains both victim and aggressor, and that, under certain circumstances, the “Nazi beast„ may awaken within each of us.

Keywords

• Holocaust
• survivors
• second generation
• transgenerational transmission
• trauma
• Grossman