Postmigration and Holocaust Memory: Olga Grjasnowa and Sasha Marianna Salzmann

Abstract

The German publication of Michael Rothberg’s seminal Multidirectional Memories (2009; 2021) occasioned a new flurry of debates around Holocaust memory culture in relation to other minority cultures, suggesting an ongoing conflict between those different memory cultures (“memory contests”). Yet literature by third-generation authors Olga Grjasnowa and Sasha Marianna Salzmann displays individuals who move seamlessly between one memory context and another, sometimes even transitioning between multiple religious, cultural, gender, and ethnic identities. Holocaust memory appears both exposed and concealed, on display and hidden from the readers’ view, but always as the pertinent frame of reference. This article addresses the multifaceted negotiations around German Jewish, German Muslim, and other “other” German identities in the context of today’s intricate Holocaust memory discourse, showing how more recent forms of autofiction and transnational identity shape today’s German Jewish memory context. (AM)