THIS STUDY ANALYZED recent works of fiction by a range of contemporary German-language Jewish writers, who belong to the so-called generation after. It centered on the question of how these authors depict and relate to the Nazi past and the Second World War in the face of major shifts in Holocaust memory since the turn of the millennium. The disappearance of the survivor and eyewitness generation entails the transition from firsthand memories of the war period to an increasingly mediatized and ritualized cultural memory of the events. This transformation intersects with larger changes in Holocaust memory in the last fifteen years, which have been characterized by the re- and hypermediation of Holocaust memory and the emergence of a global Erinnerungskultur. Memories of the Nazi past and the Holocaust are no longer discussed within an exclusively national framework but on a “transnational” or “transcultural” scale. Such approaches trace the transformation of the Holocaust into a universalized memory emblem that intersects with a variety of discourses, histories, and memories. Embedded in dense networks of plurimedial and transnational exchange, the Holocaust has thus emerged as a “floating signifier.

The altered shape of Holocaust memory in the age of remediation necessitates new ways of relating to the event: in recent years, the notion of postmemory has established itself as the central aesthetic and theoretical category that promises to illuminate the transition toward a (hyper)mediatized memory culture. In spite of its broad applicability to family novels, a central argument of this book has been that postmemory does not adequately capture the ongoing recalibrations, renegotiations, and remediations of Holocaust memory. This is so because postmemorial discourse foregrounds the familial, biological, and psychological transmission of trauma, which is imagined as a form of contagion. I explored and problematized the genesis and implications of this contagion paradigm in Marianne Hirsch's work, tracing it back to the poststructuralist trauma theory of Cathy Caruth. I then showed that the biologizing and psychologizing concept of contagion is at odds with contemporary representations of the Holocaust, which highlight the cultural mediation of memory and trauma. It is therefore necessary to complement the notion of postmemory with alternative concepts, such as “remediation” and “travelling trauma,” which contribute to a theory of cultural trauma that tackles the interplay between trauma, media, and mediatization (“remediation”), while also highlighting the (political) re- and decontextualization of traumatic memories in a global age (“travelling trauma”).