This article focuses on the Second Generation's issue of postmemory through the analysis of the novels Uma rua de Roma (Rue des boutiques obscures, 1978), by Patrick Modiano, and Austerlitz (Austerlitz, 2001) by W.G. Sebald. Patrick Modiano (born in 1945) is a French writer whose father was Jewish and had to survive in occupied Paris, while W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) was a German writer, whose father fought in the Wehrmacht. None accepted to talk to their sons about their activities during the war years. Consequently, without explanations, without a legacy, the generation that was born during or just after the war evokes in its literary work the trauma and the silence that it received as a heritage.
postmemory; Second Generation; Comparative Literature; Shoah