This chapter narrates my encounters with a past accessible only through the
stories and images of significant others, as I recount my wanderings through
Dresden, a place of postmemory for me as a child of exiles (known as
"displaced persons") who emigrated to Australia in 1950. I draw on the work
of memory studies scholars such as Marianne Hirsch, Aleida Assamann, and
Andreas Huyssen to locate my experiences. The discourses of postmemory
strongly influence how we encounter places that are overlaid with traces of
monumental historical events such as World War Two. I read Dresden
against these discourses to conceptualise relationships between postmemory
aesthetics, places and imagined local lmowledge and how these relationships
may be used for restorative creative practice.
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