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In this paper, I focus I on a series of texts, by and about the descendants of Amon Goeth, the notoriously brutal commander of the concentration camp Platzow. Goeth鈥檚 crimes initially became known to a wide audience through British actor Ralph Fiennes鈥� portrayal of him in the 1993 the Holocaust blockbuster Schindler鈥檚 List. In the quarter century since Spielberg鈥檚 movie hit the big screen, Goeth鈥檚 daughter and granddaughter each have become the focus of much press, including two popular books and one film, each of which chronicles from a different perspective the difficult emotional inheritance that knowing about one鈥檚 Holocaust perpetrator ancestor represents.[1]

I discuss these texts in terms of what Marianne Hirsch famously has described as 鈥減ostmemory.鈥� I describe the postmemory work that descendants of Nazi perpetrators engage in as they seek to make public and work through silenced familial legacies of perpetration. However, in so doing I also question the limits of the concept of postmemory for studying the inheritances of those who descend from the perpetrators. On the one hand, the three texts offer ample and potent examples of the unconscious inheritance that this difficult family legacy entails. Each text digs deep into showing the unsettlement that comes with uncovering one鈥檚 family history and learning about one鈥檚 personal and familial connection to profound histories of violence. However, working with what Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang in a different context have called 鈥渕oves to innocence鈥� I want to dig deeper into how the unsettling knowledge of one鈥檚 ancestor鈥檚 violence gets settled again through a series of different rhetorical moves, without really having to account for or to give up the benefits, power, or privilege derived from this history.