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Paper short abstract

This presentation is a multilayered auto/ethnographic exploration of postmemory research that started in 2009 as an intervention into transgenerational silence in the aftermath of the violence of the Khmer Rouge and civil war in Cambodia.

Paper long abstract

This presentation is a multilayered auto/ethnographic exploration of postmemory research that started in 2009 as an intervention into transgenerational silence in the aftermath of the violence of the Khmer Rouge and civil war in Cambodia. By looking at both, postmemory in my own German family where I grew up without any contact to my Cambodian side and postmemory among young research partners in Cambodia, I highlight the different ways in which silence frames both settings and is socio-culturally embedded. My research on memory and violence in Cambodia interrupted my family’s silence that was marked by avoidance and active forgetting. My memory research that took place in collaboration with a Cambodian Youth NGO and young people in Cambodia, on the other hand, interrupted a transgenerational silence, that was marked by a)silence that enabled the co-existence of survivors who were marked by shifting victim-perpetrator subjectivities, b) silent material witnesses such as exhumed and displayed human remains from former mass graves in Cambodia and c) Buddhist merit-making ceremonies for the dead. Thus, silence in Cambodia did not mean the absence of memory, but it also did not transmit much information about the past. My research intervened into both, the German and the Cambodian context. Methodologically and analytical these processes at work called for an ongoing reflection and almost a *purification* between my own and my research partners’ contexts and meaning making to avoid a euro-centric bias what silence in transgenerational remembrance may mean and what it transmits.