The Witness as Object

Front matter

Video Testimony in Memorial Museums

STEFFI DE JONG

MUSEUMS AND COLLECTIONS - Volume 10

Contents

List of Illustrations vi Acknowledgements viii Notes on the Text x Introduction 1 Chapter 1. The Witness to History: Conceptual Clarifications 31 Chapter 2. Genealogy: The Mediation of the Witness to History

as a Carrier of Memory 49 Chapter 3. Collecting: Turning Communicative Memory into

Cultural Memory 71 Chapter 4. Exhibiting: The Witness to History as a Museum

Introduction

Museum Visit One: On the Difficulty of Objects Telling Stories

My memory of the fourteen stations which the visitor to Breendonk passes between the entrance and the exit has clouded over in the course of time, or perhaps I could say it was clouding over even on the day when I was in the fort, whether because I did not really want to see what it had to show or because

all the outlines seemed to merge in a world illuminated only by a few dim electric bulbs, and cut off for ever from the light of nature. Even now, when I

try to remember them ... the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as

I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing

into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on. Histories, for instance, like those of the straw mattresses which lay, shadow-like, on the stacked plank beds and which had become thinner and shorter because the chaff in them disintegrated over the years, shrunken — and now, in writing this, I do remember that such an idea occurred to me at the time — as if they were the mortal frames of these who once lay there in that darkness.

After his first encounter with the mysterious character Austerlitz, the nameless first-person narrator in W.G. Sebald’s homonymous novel visits the concentration-camp memorial Breendonk. What he experiences during his visit is a confrontation with the difficulty of retaining and exhibiting the human life that once existed in a certain place and at a certain time. Even as he looks at them, the things that he sees lose their shape and vanish into darkness because, for him, places and things, as opposed to human beings, have no ‘power of memory’. That the places and objects

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remain as material witnesses of history is, for Sebald’s first-person narrator, less important than the fact that with each human life, a multiplicity of stories disappear. Even his effort to imagine the missing stories ends in an unsatisfactory anthropomorphization of the straw mattresses that, emptied of straw and memories, only look like ‘the mortal frames of these who once lay in that darkness’, although not like their former users themselves.

What Sebald alludes to here is an inherent dilemma of historical objects and places. Stones and other materials can sometimes survive for thousands of years and consequently they often constitute the only remains of a historical event. “The situation that initiates the historical object ... cannot be detached from the object, just as the situation cannot be thought about without its objects. That the respective situation belongs to the past does not mean that it is nothing anymore. As a trace, it is present in the old object and is more than nothing’, observes the museologist Alexander Klein (2004: 84). However, what does this lingering trace consist of? The straw mattresses in Breendonk testify, because of their loss of straw, to their use by the prisoners of the camp. They can nonetheless tell us very little about the prisoners themselves, their experiences in the camp or their memories of it. Little remains of the former users of an object or the former inhabitants of a place after their death or disappearance. In fact, only in very few cases do we know at all who the users or owners of historical objects, or the inhabitants of a place, were. In the specific case of Breendonk, the situation of imprisonment even precluded every personal property. The standardized objects of everyday use from concentration camps tell us something about the monstrous attempt at deindividualization in the camp, but hardly anything about the individual prisoners themselves.

Museum Visit Two: A Museum (Nearly) without Objects

The Italian city of Turin has had its own Second World War museum since 2003. The museum has been given the slightly lofty title: Museo Diffuso della Resistenza, della Deportazione, della Guerra, dei Diritti e della Libertà ( Widespread’ Museum of Resistance, Deportation, the War and Freedom! — herein Museo Diffuso). I visit the museum for the first time in January 2009. The main exhibition rooms are located in the cellar of recently renovated eighteenth-century military barracks in the historical centre of Turin. Having entered the museum on the ground floor, I am offered headphones and am then led down a dark, narrow staircase. Through the headphones I hear the voices of people who lived in Turin during the war. In short statements, these people relate how they

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Figure 0.1. Video testimonies at the Museo Diffuso © Museo Diffuso experienced those years. An employee of the museum explains to me how to move through the exhibition space: I will be moving along a virtual underground railway system whose stations are called ‘Living Everyday Life’, ‘Life under the Bombings’, ‘Life under the Regime’ and ‘Life during the Occupation’. Films will start at each station if I position myself on a particular spot on the floor. Most of these films are interviews with former inhabitants of Turin who experienced the Second World War. At every station, two such interviews are placed next to each other — one with a man and one with a woman (Figure 0.1). I cannot detect any objects in the first two exhibition rooms.

The employee leads me to a table standing in the middle of the last room (Figure 4.11). Here all the railway lines come together. The table gives me information on designated memorial places in Turin. Again, I receive this information by means of video interviews and extracts from diaries and letters accompanying little films spliced together from pictures and archival footage. On the way to the table, we pass a printing press hidden behind see-through cloth and a plain wooden chair standing isolated in a separate room on a small platform. The employee explains to me that this chair is an execution chair from the Martinetto Sacrarium, a construction offered in 1883 by the City Council to the National Association of Target Shooting in Turin and used from 1943 until the end of the War as an execution ground by the Italian Social Republic (Figure 0.2). With

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ALFREDO Arrigo,

Figure 0.2. The execution chair from the Martinetto Sacrarium at the Museo Diffuso © Museo Diffuso the — hardly visible — printing press, this execution chair is the only object in the museum.

The Museo Diffuso is thus a museum (nearly) without objects. What the museum exhibits instead are the stories whose disappearance Sebald’s first-person narrator laments. On leaving the museum, I wonder whether the Museo Diffuso is a sign that the age-old relationship between museum objects and the stories surrounding them is being turned upside down. Has memory become a museum exhibit? And, if so, how?

Video Testimonies as Museum Objects

The Museo Diffuso is only one example, albeit a radical one, from the many museums that have decided to introduce into their permanent exhibitions videos with extracts from interviews with witnesses of a historical period or event. Needless to say, objects have not been completely relinquished by all museums. Some place the videos prominently in the main

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galleries, while others hide them in dark corners or deep inside the data of computer stations. In some museums the stories can only be listened to over audiostations or on audioguides; others show extracts of video interviews. Some show professional-looking, almost artistic films on highdefinition television screens, while in others the videos are more amateurish. Some let actors read out interview sequences; others have kept the original recordings.

The trend of making the memories of individuals part of their historical narrative is especially apparent in concentration-camp memorials. If the first-person narrator of Austerlitz visited the Breendonk Memorial today, he would be able to listen to the stories of former inmates over an audioguide. If he were to visit the Bergen-Belsen, Neuengamme or Ravensbrück Memorials, he could watch interviews with survivors of the camps on video screens integrated into the permanent exhibitions. Even museums whose appeal is traditionally based on material objects now increasingly use video interviews with witnesses of past events. Apart from exhibiting weapons, medals, uniforms and dioramas, the Royal Museum ofthe Armed Forces and of Military History in Brussels also shows videos in which witnesses of the Second World War relate their experiences. The Imperial War Museum in London has produced video interviews for its Holocaust Exhibition. The Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn includes, within its rather overflowing display of historical objects and reconstructions, interview sections with, inter alia, Holocaust survivors and guest workers. In its new exhibition of the two World Wars, the Museum of London exhibits a video with pictures of destroyed cities and recordings from the Museum’s oral history project.

The material products of individual memory, such as diaries, paintings or letters, have of course for a long time had their place in museums. What is new about the exhibition of the Museo Diffuso and of the other museums that I have mentioned here is that they integrate the very process of recalling an event and verbalizing it into their representation of history. Thus, the very moment of remembrance and narrated memory have become legitimate objects of display. In this study I will consider the prerequisites and consequences of this introduction of the act of remembering into museums. My primary object of study will be video testimonies: video recordings that capture the act of remembering of witnesses to history. My aim is to analyse how video testimonies are ‘musealized’, meaning how they are adapted to the rules of the institution museum. The concept of ‘Musealisierung’ (musealization) was first used by the German philosopher Hermann Lübbe (1983: 9-14). Lübbe used the concept in order to describe how, in modernity, an acceleration of the process of disintegration

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has met with an ever-stronger reluctance to throw away objects that no longer have a use-value. For Lübbe, the concept of musealization is not tightly knitted to the institution of the museum, but primarily refers to the object that is conserved. My use of the concept of musealization will be narrower than Liibbe’s. I will consider the museum as an institution that has developed its own rules over the last two hundred years. I will use the concept of musealization in order to analyse how video testimonies are made to fit those rules. In other words, to what extent have ‘video testimonies’ become museum objects?

The exhibition of video testimonies, while also practised in museums and exhibitions with other subject matter (cf. de Jong 2011), was first — and still is — primarily found in exhibitions on the Holocaust and the Second World War. I will therefore concentrate on what Paul Williams (2007) has called ‘memorial museums’ of the Holocaust and the Second World War, namely on the Museo Diffuso, the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum London, the Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem, the Neuengamme Memorial and the Bergen- Belsen Memorial. Williams (2007: 8) defines memorial museums as ‘a specific kind of museum dedicated to a historic event commemorating mass suffering of some kind’. Memorial museums combine the function of honouring the dead of the memorial with the functions of ‘interpretation, contextualization, and critique’ (Williams 2007: 8) of the history museum. “The coalescing of the two suggests that there is an increasing desire to add both a moral framework to the narration of terrible historical events and more in-depth contextual explanations to commemorative acts, observes Williams (2007: 8).

My main concern in this study will be representation. Klas Grinell (2010: 179) of the Museum of World Cultures in Gothenburg observes that ‘the English word representation carries three rather different meanings or aspects (that in for example German is described with three different words)’. Grinell (2010: 179, italics in original) points out that:

To represent can mean to be a representative. In German this aspect is called vertretung. For this kind of representation to be legitimate the representative must be selected in a democratic fashion by those represented ...

To represent can also mean to make something present again, to copy or interpret it. This aspect of representation is covered by the German word darstellung. It concerns artistic and aesthetic work ...

A representation can also be a mental idea, image or understanding of an object or phenomenon: vorstellung in German. This is an epistemological, philosophical and psychological concept. Legitimate mental representations (vorstellungen) should correspond with reality, be true.

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These three meanings of representation as ‘Vertretung’, ‘Darstellung and ‘Vorstellung’ will accompany me through the different chapters of this study. Who or what do video testimonies represent (‘vertreten’)? In what way are video testimonies represented aesthetically (‘darstellen’)? What representations are transmitted through the use of video testimonies in museums (‘vorstellen’)? In my endeavour to answer these questions, I will concentrate on questions of witnessing and testimony, memory, globalization, mediatization and signification as central issues of cultural-memory studies and museum studies.

Witnessing: Testimonies as Post-traumatic Evidence

Although it is difficult to set a date for the integration of the first video testimonies into museums, they only started becoming a frequent phenomenon around the beginning of the new millennium. It might therefore not come as any surprise that the representation of video testimonies in museums received little attention until the late 2000s. However, since the 1990s, there has been heightened academic interest in questions of witnessing and testimony — especially in relation to the Holocaust. These studies can be subdivided into two interrelated and consecutive movements, both arguing that a new witness figure has appeared in the second half of the twentieth century. While the first movement finds this figure to be novel in the very act of witnessing something in situ; the second movement concentrates on the act of repeating what has been witnessed ex post facto. As we will see, these studies have considerably influenced the ways in which video testimonies are handled by museum professionals and how they are exhibited in museums. I will further reflect on the concepts of ‘witnessing’ and ‘testimony in Chapter 1. These concepts will allow me to grasp the theoretical influences on the musealization of video testimonies: how have studies on witnessing and testimony paved the way for the integration of video testimonies in museums? What influence have those studies had on interviewing techniques? And to what extent do exhibition makers respond to those theoretical reflections?

Studies from the first movement have mainly been developed in the milieu of the collaborators of what is today the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies (herein the Fortunoff Archive) or by scholars who, explicitly or implicitly, refer to the Archive. They position the figure of the Holocaust survivor as the new paradigmatic witness, and ascribe to it special faculties of witnessing and an unparalleled manner of giving testimony (cf. Chapter 2: pp 57-61). The supposedly unprecedented events of

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the Holocaust, and the act of witnessing and experiencing them here form the basis for reflections on trauma and the unprecedented role of being a witness to history. Although not uncontested, the idea that the Holocaust is an event that could not fully be witnessed in situ and that it is consequently beyond the purview of testimony ex post facto is one that has been formulated in ever-stronger terms over the last few decades by scholars of this first movement. In these studies, the Holocaust appears as an experience that eludes all attempts at understanding. I will here only refer to its most influential representatives.

In 1992, in his seminal study Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (coauthored with the literary theorist Shoshana Felman), the founder of the Fortunoff Archive, Dori Laub (Felman and Laub 1992: 75), defined the Holocaust as an ‘event without a witness’. For Laub, the nature of the Holocaust was such that there could not be an uninvolved witness. This has in turn led to a situation in which the survivors cannot find an ‘Other’ in themselves anymore, an ‘internal thou’ to whom they could give testimony (Felman and Laub 1992: 82). Laub sees the way out of this incapacity of survivors to bear witness to themselves in his own work as a psychoanalyst and as an interviewer for the Fortunoff Archive helping the survivors to reconstitute their internal ‘thou’. Similar to Laub, his colleague Lawrence L. Langer in Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (1991) describes video testimonies with Holocaust survivors as a medium without precedent — one that forecloses conventional methods of interpretation. This has for one thing to do with the medium of video testimony, which for Langer has to be strictly delimited from written testimonies: video testimonies, for him, do not make reference to a pre-existing literary canon or stylistic conventions. On the other hand, it has to do with the unprecedented nature of witnessing the Holocaust. For Langer, the memories of the survivors cannot be integrated into a conventional value system, because such a system cannot be reconciled with the full dimensions of the situations to which the victims of persecution and extermination were driven. Langer delineates a moral codex necessary for the interpretation of the Holocaust through the concepts: ‘deep memory’ (the survivors’ attempt to recall their Auschwitz self); ‘anguished memory’ (the witnesses’ disbelief in their own stories and the subsequent need of the interviewers to help them get to grips with their Auschwitz self and find words to express it); ‘humiliated memory’ (‘the [recollection of] an utter distress that shatters all molds designed to contain a unified and irreproachable image of the self’) (Langer 1991: 77); ‘tainted memory (the attempt of witnesses and interviewers to introduce the Auschwitz self’s actions in a pre- and post-Holocaust value system); and ‘unheroic

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memory (the survivors’ and the interviewers’ efforts to come to grips with the impossibility of heroic actions during the Holocaust). Especially the concept of ‘deep memory’, which Langer has borrowed from Holocaust survivor and writer Charlotte Delbo, is now commonly used to designate Holocaust survivors’ traumatization. Delbo opposes ‘mémoire profonde’ (deep memory) to ‘mémoire ordinaire (common memory). While deep memory ‘tries to recall the Auschwitz self as it was then; common memory has a dual function: it restores the self to its normal pre- and postcamp routines but also offers detached portraits from the vantage point of today, of what it must have been like then’ (Langer 1991: 6). Our interpretation of video testimonies must therefore, according to Langer, take into consideration both the special circumstances that survivors of persecution and extermination were thrown into, as well as the survivors’ inner division and turmoil when trying to recollect and verbalize these circumstances.

In a similar vein and influenced by Dori Laub’s works, the German cultural theorist Sigrid Weigel (1999) has argued that in a society and culture that repeatedly tries to rationalize the Holocaust, the testimonies of Holocaust survivors constitute a possible antidote against any attempt to integrate the Holocaust into history. They contain a “Verstehensrest’ (gap in comprehension) that remains after every attempt at understanding has been carried out. For Weigel, any use of the testimonies of Holocaust survivors in a juridical or historiographical context is therefore incompatible with the very nature of the testimonies.

While Laub, Langer and Weigel stress the singularity of Holocaust testimony, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (2002) goes one step further: he declares its very impossibility. Agamben observes that those who can give testimony on the Holocaust have never plumbed its depths. For him, the true witnesses were the ‘Muselmänner. ‘Muselmann’ (Muslim) was the name given by other inmates of Auschwitz to those inmates who, weakened by hunger and maltreatment, apathetically accepted their fate. Agamben argues that all the survivors can do is speak in those true witnesses’ stead.

Treating the experience of the Holocaust as unique and inexplicable, these studies also express a wish for how the testimonies of Holocaust survivors should be dealt with: not as historical sources or pieces of evidence in juridical trials, but as singular and incomparable speech acts whose importance lies in the mere act of uttering them.

Scholars of the second movement, rather than concentrating on witnessing the Holocaust, argue that a new memorial culture has appeared. In this new memorial culture, the voice of those who have taken part in events of historical importance not as decision makers, but as the objects

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of those decisions is granted an unprecedented importance. Thus, Annette Wieviorka, in what has become a seminal study in the field, discusses the recording of video testimonies as a phenomenon and a marker of what she calls The Era of the Witness (1998). Besides Wieviorka, the studies of the second movement are mainly an affair of academics from the German-speaking countries. The interest in the witness to history is here partly triggered by the fear of some historians that they might lose their authoritative position: the saying “Der Zeitzeuge ist der größte Feind des Historikers’ (“The witness to history is the historian’s biggest enemy’) has by now become a winged word.

The topic was fired by the panel ‘Der Zeitzeuge. Annäherung an ein geschichtskulturelles Gegenwartsphanomen (“The Witness to History: Approaching a Phenomenon of Contemporary Public History’) at the German Historians’ Day in 2006, followed up in 2008 with a well-visited conference in Jena with the title ‘Die Geburt des Zeitzeugen nach 1945’ (‘The Birth of the Witness to History after 1945’) (Bollmann 2006; Kellerhoff 2006). The year 2008 also saw the publication of several major studies on witnesses to history in media (Elm 2008; Fischer and Wirtz 2008; Keilbach 2008). The main focus of these studies are the didactic functions of video testimonies in TV documentaries. They thereby also consider witnesses who are not Holocaust survivors. In particular, they criticize the video testimonies in the documentaries of the German TV historian Guido Knopp for ZDF History for their lack of differentiating between different witness figures — victims, perpetrators and bystanders — and for the brevity of the statements. More recently, the interest has expanded to other media as well. Michael Bachmann (2010) has studied the aesthetical and discursive strategies in which — fictional and real — witnesses to history are used to legitimize certain narratives about the Holocaust. Other scholars have been looking at the didactic uses of those testimonies (Barricelli 2007, Obens 2014), as well as at their ongoing digitization (Bothe 2012, 2014; Presner 2016; Smith 2016).

One of the earliest studies considering the musealization of video testimonies is the article ‘Lebensgeschichtliche Erinnerungszeugnisse in Museen’ (‘Biographical Testimonies in Museums’) published in 1992 by the German oral historian Alexander von Plato. This article is based on the results of a study group that had been formed with the aim of exploring how to integrate biographical stories into museums and how to develop video testimonies for an exhibition on workers’ history. The study group came to the conclusion that ‘the presentation of extensive biographical stories is possible in special seminars and in other didactic fora, but that it otherwise has to be subdivided into different aspects that can be perceived

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by the audience either on their own or as a reconstituted whole (von Plato 1992: 226). They therefore promote short video clips of three to five minutes. As we will see, their results outline the ways in which video testimonies are actually presented in most museums today. Other early preoccupations with the topic are the British historians Tony Kushner’s (2001) and Andrew Hoskins’ (2003) respective articles ‘Oral History at the Extremes of Human Experience: Holocaust Testimony in a Museum Setting and ‘Signs of the Holocaust: Exhibiting Memory in a Mediated Age’. Both analyse the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Exhibition.

However, with the increasingly frequent use of video testimonies in exhibitions, the reflection on this use also met with heightened interest. Several conferences looking into the musealization of video testimonies were organized in recent years: the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation’s International Bergen-Belsen Conference on ‘Witnessing: Sites of Destruction and the Representation of the Holocaust’ (2009), the Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe’s "Zeitzeugen im Museum’ (‘Witnesses to History in the Museum’) (2011) in Görlitz and the German Museums Association's ‘Zeitzeuginnen und Zeitzeugen in Geschichtsmuseen (‘Witnesses to History in History Museums’) (2012) in Nuremberg. In October 2013 a special issue on witnesses to history in museums of the historical journal WerkstattGeschichte was published.

Studies of the second movement are inspired by the implications of the first movement. Under their empirical analyses lies the normative claim of how things should have been done (better). As we will see, most museums are also highly aware of the ethical implications of exhibiting video testimonies with Holocaust survivors. Often, they try for example not to make the same mistakes pointed out for the case of video testimonies in TV documentaries. Most importantly, the very integration of witnesses to history into memorial museums can be seen as a direct response to the claim of the scholars of the first movement that the voices of the survivors need to be listened to and treated with respect.

Memory: Communicative Memory and/as Cultural Memory

The video testimonies that I analyse show witnesses to history that remember. These video testimonies are in turn represented in the public institution of the memorial museum. An analysis of video testimonies is therefore always an analysis of what has been termed ‘individual memory’, ‘communicative memory’ and ‘cultural memory’ — concepts that will allow me

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to approach questions like: what happens in the process of remembering in front of a camera? What transitions of memorial contexts have video testimonies undergone over the years? And what happens to the video testimonies once they are put into a museum or an archive?

Memory has, over the last thirty-odd years, received an unprecedented level of attention from scholars of such distinct disciplines as the neurosciences, psychology, psychoanalysis, history, media studies, cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, ethnology and philosophy. The neurosciences, psychology and psychoanalysis are primarily interested in what is generally called individual memory and thus in the question of how individuals remember and forget the past. They have also tried to get to grips with such phenomena as flashbacks, repression or traumatization. I will come back to the findings of these studies in Chapter 3.

The interest of such disciplines as history, media studies, cultural studies, literary studies, ethnology and philosophy in turn is in the way in which groups make sense of the past and try to transmit their interpretations thereof. They tend to speak of ‘collective memory’ or ‘cultural memory’. The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs is generally seen as the founding father of memory studies. In the time after the First World War and during the Second World War, Halbwachs wrote three works that came to lay the foundations for modern-day cultural-memory studies: Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1994 [1925]), La topographie legendaire des évangiles en terre sainte: Etude de mémoire collective (2008 [1941]) and La mémoire collective (1997 [1950]). The last one of these works was published posthumously after Halbwachs’ death in 1945 in Buchenwald Concentration Camp. Unlike the then-fashionable psychoanalytical studies with their focus on the individual and its subconscious, Maurice Halbwachs upheld the view that truth lies in society (cf. Klein 2000: 127). Anticipating many of the findings of modern-day neurological studies, Halbwachs concluded that we cannot reflect from outside the prism of the social groups that we are living in and that we are surrounded by; it is in relation to the people that we are in contact with every day that we remember. We generally have experiences in the company of other people, so that our memories are connected to those people. According to Halbwachs, even in situations where we are completely alone, we are still thinking of others or imagining them having those experiences with us.

Halbwachs was also the first to make a distinction between what he called ‘mémoire individuelle’ (individual memory) and ‘mémoire collective? (collective memory). Unlike individual memory, collective memory consists of the memories that are important for a group’s identity, but that are not necessarily based on the experiences of the members of that

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group. Like individual memory, collective memory changes over time, some memories being more important for a certain group at a certain point in time than others. It disappears once the relevant group is no longer interested in a certain memory; once the group disperses; or once the members of the group have died. Collective memory and individual memory are of course interrelated. Groups are made up of individuals with their own memories who come to influence the group memory and in turn are influenced by this memory.