Postmemory dreaming: Nightmares of war in third-generation descendants of Polish and Russian survivors of World War II

Abstract

Various manifestations of intergenerational memory transmission have been discussed in many scientific fields. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to these phenomena in the context of dreams. Yet, the sphere of dreaming seems the most informative illustration of how the tragic past influenced the second and third-generation descendants of trauma survivors. Based on my talks with two descendants of WWII survivors—a Russian woman and a Polish man—I define “postmemory dreams” as night visions affected by cultural representations of historical events. The theoretical background of my study is Hirsch's concept of postmemory, Hall's continuity hypothesis of dreaming, and anthropological dream research. Postmemory dreams reflect and are shaped by the ethos of remembering and commemorating the war—the ethos often imposed by political forces and propaganda—in which the dreamers live. In the cases of my interviewees, these are the Polish ethos of victimhood and the Russian ethos of heroism.