Projected Memories and Maus

While reading Hirsch's Projected Memories Hirsch explores Postmemory. She explains Postmemory as stories a certain group of people or person can only remember based upon images and the stories of others who experiences it first hand. In Hirsch's essay she describes the feelings of second generation Jewish who do not fully understand the dangers their parents or other children went through during the Holocaust. This idea of Postmemory connected to Maus in many ways. In Maus Artie tries to use postmemory to draw his father's story and make other people get an idea of it. He also tries constantly to connect to his father by seeing what his father or other Jewish people went through during Nazi control of Europe. Arties uses postmemory by looking at images, pictures, having his father explain in detail, and by listening to his father's story. Hirsch describes part of postmemory as a traumatic experience that happened to the generation before them that effects them either way. In the case of Artie it is the Holocaust because he never witnessed the Holocaust but it effected his father and therefore effected him. It effected how outsiders think of him and his father. A lot of what has to do with Artie is because of his father's insane habits that is what Hirsch is trying to explain about Postmemory. That the next generations are effected by something they never witnessed. They also can never really understand it, and Artie proves that multiple times during the graphic novel. I use Maus as an example because I think the whole novel is about Postmemory. Artie is trying to build a story about his father that effects him based upon something he's never witnessed, or can fathom. Especially since Postmemory relys so much on pictures, and the graphic novel format used by Maus gave pictures of everything, although they were pictures of mice, and cats, and things you still saw pictures and were given Vladek's explanation of each picture. This made the novel that much stronger because it used postmemory to get Vladek's story out and help you understand just a little bit the struggle that people went through. This is what Hirsch is trying to say about postmemory I feel. It is a tool for people to use to help them easier connect to someone or something.