The historian and philologist Marianne Hirsch coined the term Postmemory, the memory after the memory, in the context of the second generation of Holocaust survivors.
Hirsch defines postmemory as the memory characteristic of "the experience of those who have been shaped by narratives that preceded their birth, formed by traumatic events that cannot be fully understood or reconstructed."
According to her, postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its ties to the source are not mediated by personal recollections of what was but are forged by filling gaping voids through imagination and creativity.