ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces and explains the central concept of this volume: postcatastrophe. It is used as a diagnostic tool to analyze the afterlife of the Shoah in contemporary culture and serves to identify strategies and esthetics of writing about the genocide of European Jews as well as other 20th-century catastrophes. Postcatastrophe is informed by the knowledge of other concepts of “post” and shares their insight into forms of transmission and latency, but, in contrast to them, explores the after-effects of extreme events on a collective, aesthetic, and political rather than a personal level and does not imply any form of distancing. The most important features for postcatastrophic esthetics are a complex temporality (retroactivity as well as futurity), postcatastrophic transmission (biographical, economical, societal), and the relation between postcatastrophe and remembrance. The concept of postcatastrophe is a key to understanding the entangled and conflicted cultures of remembrance in postsocialist literatures and the arts dealing with events, phenomena, and developments that refuse to stay in the past and still continue to shape perceptions of today’s societies in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European. The concept of postcatastrophe serves to integrate the Shoah not only in a wider context but also in semantic proximity to other crises of the 20th century, in order to work out their peculiarities or differences between different types of genocide and their afterlife.
