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Overview
Institutions that have collected video testimonies from the few remaining Holocaust survivors are grappling with how to continue their mission to educate and commemorate. Noah Shenker calls attention to the ways that audiovisual testimonies of the Holocaust have been mediated by the institutional histories and practices of their respective archives.
Shenker argues that testimonies are shaped not only by the encounter between interviewer and interviewee, but also by technical practices and the testimony process—and analyzes the ways in which interview questions, the framing of the camera, and curatorial and programming preferences impact how Holocaust testimony is molded, distributed, and received.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253017178 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | The Modern Jewish Experience |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 260 |
| File size: | 564 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Noah Shenker is 6a Foundation Lecturer in Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University.
Read an Excerpt
Reframing Holocaust Testimony
By Noah Shenker
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2015 Noah ShenkerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01717-8
CHAPTER 1
Testimonies from the Grassroots
The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
The founders of what would become the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies envisioned a "provisional community bound by memory and the recognition of trauma" — one that nurtures a responsibility for witnesses by giving priority to their voices. Its identity as an "affective community" for interviewees was a central focus at an academic conference held in 2002 to mark the archive's twentieth anniversary at Yale University. Conference organizers and participants acknowledged that Holocaust testimony projects were on the cusp of a paradigmatic transition in which the living authority of survivors would be transferred to the archives documenting their memories.
The participants in that event expressed their eagerness to move away from the view of testimony collection as direct, unmediated practice, recognizing instead that "these projects insist that Holocaust history cannot be pursued without a simultaneous inquiry into the conditions of memory and representations within which this history is produced and received." Nonetheless, a published account of that meeting at Yale reveals the participants' primary focus on the dynamic relationships between subject, interviewer, and audience — on the notion that testimonies are products of the context in which they are created and produced, if only in terms of the moments captured on camera. Only by acknowledging the workings of testimony would the Fortunoff holdings become a "living archive" accessed by future generations. That future user of testimony will inherit not only the mutual labor between interviewer and interviewee — that is to say, the acts of testimonial production as captured on camera alone — but also the institutional histories and testimonial exchanges that take place prior and subsequent to the interviews.
The Local Origins of the Fortunoff Archive
The production of testimonies in the Fortunoff Archive can be traced to efforts within the New Haven, Connecticut, Jewish community in the mid- to late 1970s to create a monument to the Holocaust. This campaign ultimately led to efforts to record the testimonies of Holocaust witnesses living in the area. A parallel of sorts led to the development of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., as will be discussed in more detail in chapter 2. The key point here is that the visions and frameworks for the Fortunoff Archive and the Holocaust Museum were both forged in the late 1970s, a pivotal moment in Holocaust commemoration. In both cases, the initial campaign to create a Holocaust monument became linked to the recording of survivor testimony, sparked by the realization that firsthand witnesses would soon be passing from the scene.
At various points in its institutional history the Fortunoff Archive has entered into collaborative agreements with the Holocaust Museum on collecting video history. Furthermore, Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation consulted with the archive as it finalized its own plans for developing a repository of Holocaust testimonies. In other words, the three institutions covered in this book did not develop in isolation from one another; rather, their staffs were often in conversation and even collaborated at various junctures. Yet, despite the similarities in their origins, the histories of the Fortunoff Archive and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have diverged in critical ways. While a federal mandate established the Holocaust Museum, the Fortun off Archive owed its creation to more grassroots efforts. Thus, in February 1979, representatives of the New Haven Jewish Federation and the television station WNH-TV met to discuss the making of a documentary about the creation of a local memorial, which in turn led television producer and personality Laurel Vlock to contact New Haven psychiatrist and child survivor Dori Laub. That meeting led to a video testimony with Laub later that year, and from there four more survivors were recorded. In 1981 the original tapes of what had become the Holocaust Survivors Film Project were deposited at Yale University, and in 1982 the Video Archive was officially established as part of the Manuscripts and Archives Division of Yale's Sterling Memorial Library. The Video Archive later produced an eighteen-minute-long program to be presented at the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Washington, D.C., in 1983. The intent was to encourage other survivors to come forward and record their stories on videotape. While the planners of the USHMM played a crucial role at that gathering, that museum had yet to develop an oral history department. The Fortunoff Archive was the first American institution to dedicate itself to the collection of Holocaust video testimony. The subsequent campaign to reach out to survivors beyond New Haven and record their testimony on a national scale also grew out of a grassroots effort to organize a survivor community eager to solidify its legacy.
Financial support from the Charles H. Revson Foundation, for the purpose of increasing the number of interviews for the Video Archive, made possible a series of six-week training sessions for potential interviewers in 1984. That same year, Joanne Rudof came to the archive, initially as its manager, later to become its archivist. In 1987, through a major endowment from Alan A. Fortunoff, the Video Archive was renamed the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.
The Fortunoff Archive currently has a collection of approximately 4,400 interviews, constituting more than 10,000 hours of footage in twenty languages, accessible through thirty-seven affiliates across the world. Its subjects include not only Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, but also Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, political prisoners, bystanders, members of Hitler Youth, and other categories of experience. Since the first Fortunoff testimonies date from 1979, compared to the Holocaust Museum's in 1989, and the Shoah Foundation's in 1994, its interviewees were considerably younger during their recordings and closer to the events remembered. Thus, the archive was better positioned to interview survivors whose Holocaust experiences occurred in the adult stages of their lives, and, in this respect, the other two archives encompass a narrower demographic sampling of witnesses.
Conceptual Framework
From its inception, the Fortunoff Archive emphasized the human dimensions of suffering at the heart of the Holocaust, rather than the broader historical picture. Speaking for the archive, the project director and literary theorist Geoffrey Hartman explained:
It is our wish to document the tragedy and to show it in its full human detail. But we do not try to make historians of the survivors. We listen to them, try to free their memories, and see each person as more than a victim: as someone who faces those traumas again, an eyewitness who testifies in public.
While Hartman values the historical insights that can be gleaned from testimony, he contends that scholars too often neglect the emotional and personal textures of memory. Testimony, he argues, can supplement historians' work, in particular by being directed to what he characterizes as the "audiovisually oriented" younger generations. In his view, the archive aims to give willing witnesses the opportunity to record their testimonies, rather than designating an "elite" cadre of interviewees. The agency of those witnesses, not the agenda of the institution or the interviewer, is critical: "They [the interviewer] should never take the initiative away from the person interviewed."
The Fortunoff Archive's openness to all witnesses has not, however, always implied a mission to reach the broadest possible audience for its holdings. Unlike the Shoah Foundation, the Fortunoff Archive has made its testimonies primarily available through physical, on-site access at Yale's Sterling Library, and it has been careful to regulate the broader online circulation of its collections. On the one hand, it has been actively involved with developing educational programming for such initiatives as Facing History and Ourselves, and it co-produced the PBS documentary Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, which featured excerpts from the archive's survivor testimonies. But throughout its history, the archive has resisted use of its materials in commercial or otherwise more mainstream venues. To quote Hartman once again, "It is essential that these moving, personal narratives be properly and effectively utilized by public television, museum exhibits, and school programs." Conspicuously absent from this list of platforms are commercial film and television. In the case of the Fortunoff Archive, there has been a long-held and often justified concern with buffering archived testimonies from what are seen as the blurred boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, sanctity and kitsch, often associated with more popular representations of the Holocaust.
To take one example, the Fortunoff archivist Joanne Rudof remarked to me how the release of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) had the effect of shaping and often distorting testimonies related to the subject of Oskar Schindler that the archive recorded after the film's release. Related, in the report chronicling the Yale conference, participants draw clear distinctions between the Fortunoff Archive and other testimony repositories — arguing that the former facilitates the agency of witnesses, while the latter privilege their own agendas, with the effect of distorting or idealizing redemptive Holocaust experiences. In the report, this perspective is explicitly anchored in the historical origins of the Fortunoff Archive, particularly in its development as a reaction against the representations of the Holocaust in the popular American miniseries Holocaust produced by nbc in 1978. As an antidote to what many viewed as this series' commercialization and homogenization of the events, the Fortunoff Archive aimed to restore sanctity and rigor to Holocaust memory.
For certain scholars who participated in the 2002 academic conference at the Fortunoff Archive, the homogenization of the Holocaust promoted by the nbc miniseries was also manifested in Spielberg's film Schindler's List (1993) and even in his founding of the Shoah Foundation. Sidney Bolkosky, the head of the Fortunoff Archive's affiliate program at the University of Michigan in Dearborn, contended that the Shoah Foundation adopted an overly interventionist approach to engaging with witnesses, or in other cases edited interviews to omit familiar, canned stories. Both approaches, he suggested, leave out the "shared sense of collaborative labor" that marks testimony. Bolkosky also expressed concern regarding what he regarded as the densely standardized format used by the Shoah Foundation, in particular its long pre-interview questionnaire, its reliance on a list of interview questions, and its encouragement of witnesses to end their recordings with redemptive messages, followed by on-camera scenes with family members. In the eyes of some scholars, this was seen to represent the redemptive dramatization or "Schindlerization" of Holocaust Memory.
Lawrence Langer and Anti-Redemptive Testimony
The involvement in 1984 of literary scholar Lawrence Langer in the Fortunoff Archive, both as a long-time interviewer and as a researcher working with its collections, marks an important period in its development. The archive positions his book Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (1991) — based on Langer's close examination of testimonies in the Video Archive — as a foundational work on the subject and a representation of many of the archive's core methodologies. Indeed, the archive soon adopted Langer's work as a text for developing its approach to testimony, and incorporated it into training sessions for volunteer interviewers. Langer's approach to testimony was reflected in many of the interviews analyzed for my book. At its center, his work emphasizes the anti-redemptive experiences and "choiceless choices" of those who survived the Holocaust, rather than privileging catharsis. He underscores how testimony can begin to reveal what life was like for witnesses under circumstances that systematically undermined moral and ethical values. Rather than imposing heroic or healing narrative frameworks on testimonies, this conception of testimony is intended to allow witnesses to express the anti-redemptive aspects of their experiences. While it is impossible for anyone other than a witness to understand what he or she went through, according to Langer, the interviewer and the audience are nonetheless obliged to try to understand, even while knowing the impossibility of doing so. In this sense, Langer advocates a mode of conducting and receiving testimonies that is engaged with witnesses without being appropriative of their experiences; while deeply invested, it nonetheless recognizes the experiential rift that separates witnesses from those who bear witness to their acts of testimonies.
By way of engaging Charlotte Delbo, Langer distinguishes intellectual or "common memory" from the "memory of the senses," otherwise referred to as "deep memory." While survivors express common memory in a chronological and coherent structure — recalling in the present moment how events unfolded in the compartmentalized past — deep memory takes witnesses back to the events, reintroducing them to the range of senses experienced at that time and complicating any efforts to keep that past coherent and compartmentalized. Throughout testimonies, these two threads of memory are often intertwined, so that witnesses find themselves immersed in the past, indeed at a moment that they had initially narrated from a point of distance and separation. It is equally possible for accounts to assume narrative coherence and chronology after an emotionally wrenching return to the past sparks a vivid recollection of a particular name, date, or other historical detail. Langer stresses the evasiveness of deep memory, however, characterized as it is by fragmentation and extremity, making witnesses less forthcoming in laying bare such experiences. And in many cases, Langer reminds us, interviewers reliant upon a standardized interview narrative and protocol are inclined to keep testimonies ordered along the lines of common memory, closed off to the more nuanced layers and turns of deep memory.
This conceptualization of the layers of memory is not simply theoretical to Langer but also clearly informs his approach to conducting interviews for the Fortunoff Archive. His methodology was central to his prior work as an outside consultant helping the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum refine its own oral history practices. In written correspondence in 1991 between Langer and Michael Berenbaum, then project director for the United States Holocaust Museum, Langer discusses the interviews from the Yale archive that he viewed as the "most dramatic and eloquent," and thus potentially valuable to the Holocaust Museum as it cultivated its own oral history protocol.
One such testimony was that of Irene W., recorded by the Holocaust Survivors Film Project (the predecessor of the Fortunoff Archive) in 1982. Langer places particular importance on witnesses' transition between chronological or common memory and less structured deep memory, thus underscoring what he describes as the "fluid structure of these narratives." For example, in the midst of Irene's description of hiding her jewelry before being deported, her story jumps ahead to the time immediately after the war when she returns to her house to reclaim those precious items. What happened to Irene, Langer asks, between her deportation and her return home? There is a substantial gap between those two events, he notes, and the listener is left wondering if and how she will return to that middle portion of her story.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Reframing Holocaust Testimony by Noah Shenker. Copyright © 2015 Noah Shenker. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Testimonies from the Grassroots: The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
2. The Centralization of Holocaust Testimony: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
3. The Cinematic Origins and the Digital Future of the USC Shoah Foundation
4. Telling and Retelling Holocaust Testimonies
Conclusion: Documenting Testimonies of Genocide through the Lens of the Holocaust
Notes
References
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Reframing Holocaust Testimony is essential reading for anyone working with survivor testimonies. Noah Shenker subtly and generously shows us how the survivors' recollection and transmission of their stories are shaped not only by their interviewers' questions, but also by the archival practices of the institutions that make them available to future listeners."
What makes Noah Shenker's book so distinctive is his insistence that testimony is shaped by many institutional factors that profoundly effect whether or not a witness is 'allowed' access to deep memory. His discussion of what gets lost in the spaces between formal interviews—during breaks, before interviews, after them—is fascinating, and a very smart way to interrogate what exactly gets remembered, who is in charge of acts of remembrance, and what are further potentialities for archives of Holocaust memory.
Noah Shenker's research points to key questions about how best to make use of the troves of valuable testimony that have been collected and the dilemmas of balancing the desire to collect, record, and memorialize the Holocaust with the imperatives to teach, research, and prevent future genocides. As scholars turn to usage of A-V testimony in greater numbers, Shenker's work will become an indispensable guide for how to utilize such testimonies critically and effectively.
Arguing for enhanced "testimonial literacy," Noah Shenker has taken the study of Holocaust testimonies to a new level by examining the internal working papers as well as key videotaped testimonies of the three major institutions that have created archives of Holocaust testimony. He demonstrates how cultures, agendas, and interviewing practices "frame" the testimonies they have collected as well as how witnesses assert their own voices and tell their own stories.
Reframing Holocaust Testimony is essential reading for anyone working with survivor testimonies. Noah Shenker subtly and generously shows us how the survivors' recollection and transmission of their stories are shaped not only by their interviewers' questions, but also by the archival practices of the institutions that make them available to future listeners.
Reframing Holocaust Testimony is essential reading for anyone working with survivor testimonies. Noah Shenker subtly and generously shows us how the survivors' recollection and transmission of their stories are shaped not only by their interviewers' questions, but also by the archival practices of the institutions that make them available to future listeners.
What makes Noah Shenker's book so distinctive is his insistence that testimony is shaped by many institutional factors that profoundly effect whether or not a witness is 'allowed' access to deep memory. His discussion of what gets lost in the spaces between formal interviews—during breaks, before interviews, after them—is fascinating, and a very smart way to interrogate what exactly gets remembered, who is in charge of acts of remembrance, and what are further potentialities for archives of Holocaust memory.