Transgenerational Survivor's Guilt Lasting Effect and Negative Impact on a Person's Life

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Human history has always included war and violence. Armed wars have led people to flee their homes worldwide; and millions of them are refugees. Exposure to conflict and violence profoundly affects society and people's personal lives. Violence and war such as the Holocaust may have transgenerational implications, in addition to trauma-related psychopathology in individuals who have been exposed. The term 'trauma transmission' has been used to characterize these effects, described as attitudes, emotions and behaviors created by survivors' experiences and passed down to their children. The impacts of transgenerational survivors' guilt can be seen in different ways, such as nightmares, difficulties sleeping, flashbacks to the traumatic event, loss of motivation, anger, a sensation of numbness, and concerns about the meaning of life. In the novel Mau by Art Spiegelman and Robert S. Leventhal’s " Art Spiegelman's MAUS: Through the Trauma of the Holocaust” as a secondary source, both books speak about Art’s father experience during the Shoah and Spiegelman life experience. This paper delves deeply into how transgenerational survivor’s guilt can have a lasting and significant negative impact on a person's life, Art as the case study.
Art resents his parents' stifling affection since it suffocates his identity and overall being. This masked or twisted perception of emotion influences how the second generation absorbs their parents' trauma. The pressures of replacing Richieu, relieving his parents' trauma, and surviving to preserve their memories all weigh heavily on Art. Though Art never expresses regret for Richieu, he does express regret for his death. His entire being is infused with Anja's death. Not only does he have to remember Richieu, but he also has to remember his mother. Art is scarred by his parents' adversity and his mother's death, which adds another dimension of suffering to his life. Additionally, Art suffers from trauma. Art himself reflected on how trauma naturally comes to him. "After all, disaster is my muse!" (Spiegelman 200) This is also seen when he visits his Czech psychoanalyst Pavel, a survivor of Auschwitz and Terezin.
Art employs the language of comics to help us understand what cannot be seen or said about the horrors of genocide and its transgenerational impact. The combination of images and words is conducive to past and present persons collapsing. According to Leventhal, Spiegelman uses comics to make readers aware of different times in the same space, crucial in understanding the persistence and recurrence of trauma in Spiegelman's life. The fading of past and present is expressed in various ways that entail the combination of images and words, at times mostly images and elsewhere predominant language. Across the novel, Art portrays pictures depicting what transpired during the Holocaust. Arts style of writing depicts how pervasive and traumatic the memory of the Holocaust is for Art. His novel bears witness to the process of bearing witness, as well as the technological and technical requirements of tape-recording and writing to create a narrative of the trauma and illustrate the signs of transgenerational survivors...