For this year’s Weinmann Lecture, Marianne Hirsch, a specialist in trauma, memory, photography, and the Holocaust, will analyze a group journey to Czernowitz and Transnistria, exploring how memory is activated in survivors and their descendants at the sites of past trauma. Through the lens of what she calls “postmemory”—transgenerational memories of traumatic events suffered only indirectly—she will discuss the communities forged in the virtual and actual afterlives of destroyed European Jewish worlds.

Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Professor at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and Codirector of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference at Columbia University. Her published works include Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (author, 1997); The Familial Gaze (editor, 1999); Gender and Cultural Memory (coeditor, 2002); Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (coeditor, 2004); and Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (coauthor, 2010). Her books The Generation of Postmemory: Visual Cultures after the Holocaust, which she authored, and Rites of Return, which she coedited, are forthcoming in 2011.

A reception follows the lecture. RSVPs are requested at www.ushmm.org/events/weinmannlecture2011.

The Weinmann Lecture honors Holocaust survivors and their fates, experiences, and accomplishments. Born in Poland and raised in Austria, Monna Steinbach Weinmann (1906–1991) fled to England in autumn 1938. Otto Weinmann (1903–1993), born in Vienna and raised in Czechoslovakia, served in the Czechoslovak, French, and British armies; was wounded at Normandy; and received the war medal Croix de Guerre for his valiant contributions during the war. Monna Steinbach and Otto Weinmann married in London in 1941 and emigrated to the United States in 1948.

This annual lecture has been made possible by Janice Weinman Shorenstein.