Johanna Bodenstab, New Haven, Ct. Beyond the edges of language. Preliminary notes on biographical video interviews, collected in the "Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Survivors"
- The video interviews collected in the "Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies" are biographical interviews. Survivors’ experiences of the Holocaust are the motive for recording these interviews and form the center of interest but these experiences are not reflected upon as something detached from the biography of the person interviewed. The entire life of the interview partner, reaching back to childhood and the period before the Holocaust as well as forward to life after survival, generally serves as a loose structural framework for the interview. "Before" and "After" permit the experiences of persecution to appear in the context of a "normal" existence, the context in which the survivors also see them.
This interplay and co-existence of different realms of experience (childhood in Belorussia, then the ghetto, life in hiding, partisan warfare, DP camp and finally emigration to the United States, work and family life with children and grandchildren) is by no means without its problems. For most survivors, the Holocaust destroyed the continuity of their experiences and, in contrast to bygone episodes which leave only a memory, the experience of the Holocaust continues to have its after-effects in most lives. The Holocaust has the power to question the existence of survivors in the present. This life-long problem is the starting point for narrative and essentially determines what form of contact to his/her Holocaust experiences a survivor will find in the course of the interview.
How can one render these experiences in the form of a narrative, when the possibility that they might again take shape is precisely what one fears? How can one tell the story without losing the fragile inner balance which one has managed to maintain for decades, despite these experiences? The traces of the story follow a path in between the defensive gestures of post-Holocaust normality, gestures which attempt to ward off the attacks of memory, and find their continuation in the traumatic convulsions of the Holocaust experience, where language is shattered. As the video interviews show, the narratives of survivors project beyond the edges of language.
Memory finding its way back to consciousness
There are no clear-cut guidelines for survivors to follow during the interviews. The two interviewers do not follow a catalog of questions, do not suggest how survivors should organize their narrative, and generally behave more like interested listeners. They offer emotional support to the survivor struggling with his/her story. During the interview, they are his/her point of orientation, the direction in which the interviewee speaks. They resemble Virgil accompanying Dante through the inferno. Only in very rare cases are they themselves familiar with the places visited (in other words, themselves survivors of the Holocaust), but they see to it that the spirit does not lose its way on its trip through the inferno and that it later finds its way back from the depths of hell. In the video testimonies, the survivors’ encounter with the traumatic experience of the Holocaust corresponds to the descent into hell — the confrontation with that part of the past which has been repressed from consciousness, which permeates the present with vague presentiments and repetitions, but which cannot assume a tangible form. If the survivor feels secure enough in the company of his/her listeners, then memory can find its way back into consciousness.
A dynamic line determines the course of narrative and connects the survivor with the interviewers. The other central dynamic, which is the source of the interview’s narrative structure, is the relationship between the survivor and his/her memory, between memory and the survivor. Contact between these two is by no means amicable. The emotional movement resulting from this contact may be so conflict-ridden that regulating this movement through speech may be partially or completely unsuccessful. Traumatic memories do not lend themselves to being captured in words, for they are recorded non-verbally, as images, perceptions of the senses, and affects. Words remain a foreign medium, introduced to memory by the survivor, a foreign language, into which she/he attempts to translate memory. This foreignness also means that words cannot defuse the affective and highly emotional nature of memory. Language offers no security in dealing with these memories. Although language is a major factor in the dynamic played out between survivors and memory, it does not serve to regulate that dynamic. Memory imposes onto the survivor forms of expression which lie beyond her/his language capabilities. Video testimonies record these non-verbal elements as part of the course of narrative, showing them as part of a story which words alone fail to reproduce completely.
One could say that the stories of survivors have two narrators: memory and the survivors themselves. The dynamic relationship between these two might be compared to a pas de deux, in which the roles of the dancer who is leading and the one being lead constantly shift. The resemblance is not a question of aesthetics; the relationship reminds one of a dance because it is not based on content expressed in language. This pas de deux resembles a St. Vitus’ dance, a dizzy staggering, a game of cat and mouse (in which it is undecided whether memory is a mouse hunting the survivor or memory plays with the survivor as if it were a mouse). But in its desperate stubbornness, it is perhaps more like Jacob and the angel wrestling with one another. Throughout the entire interview, they circle around one another, related to each other in ever-changing constellations, as lovers or antipodes. It is irrelevant whether they are searching for or repelling each other, since every possible movement is part of the dance, a facet of the dynamic which connects memory and the survivor. The narrative thus never breaks off, not for a single moment. It goes on continuously for the duration of the recording.
Pain that knows no words
The pas de deux is not based on a choreography but develops instead as an improvisation. The movement of the narrative does not follow a plan, it finds its direction spontaneously. Everything depends on chance, no gesture is chosen for its effects, nothing composed with an eye to a possible ending. The story develops en passant, is found in the movement of narrative, held on course by the various dynamic lines.
Repetitions can mark aspects of the story which are of central importance for the survivor but which he/she also finds it difficult to speak of. It is as if he/she runs up again and again, only to slide back in the face of the emotional force of memory. Sometimes the narrator only succeeds in encircling the experience, but not in naming it. Here, the existence of memory becomes apparent, but not its content. At times a signal from the interviewer can help - it need not be a direct question. Sometimes the survivor succeeds in getting a grip on memory by himself. One survivor arrives at the ramp in Auschwitz eight times in the course of her interview. Although she spent only a very short time there herself, Auschwitz plays a central role in her story. It is as if all her thoughts inevitably lead to Auschwitz, every line of narrative ends at the ramp. Finally, we learn that the woman arrives there with her entire family (more than 40 people) and that this arrival was a leave-taking, that besides herself and her daughter everyone else, including her husband, was sent from the ramp to the gas chambers. This statement ends in a silence which contrasts an otherwise very eloquent interview. Pain is locked up inside the eloquent language, pain that knows no words.
Talking heads and talking flesh
Besides telling stories of survival, the video testimonies deal with the dynamics which aid in organizing oral narrative. They thus deal with the act of narrative itself - the work put into one's own history, the efforts made. They show survivors as talking heads and as talking flesh. The video images show that the act of narrative is not a mere production of words but also an act of the body. In the stories of survivors — video recordings reveal this - speech and body language are intricately interwoven.
In keeping with the insights of Bessel van der Kolk, one can assume that the body "keeps an account" of every experience, storing it as a memory of the cell or a memory of the senses.1 This bookkeeping in the flesh has no need of the coding of speech in words. When a body remembers its survival, it communicates the contents of its memory as body language. Thus, in some interviews, the survivor begins to cough when he/she speaks of deportation and describes the closeness and heat in the stock car. These memories make one's throat dry, as if the body were remembering its former thirst.
But the flesh communicates not only the memories, it also relates the emotions and feelings which are unleashed by these memories. One can interpret these bodily expressions as a commentary. In extreme cases, the onslaught of memories can lead to a physical breakdown - the body is literally unable to bear memory. Usually, however, bodily expression and speech run parallel. The flesh is directly involved in the narrative. The narrator's discomfort in telling a story can often be more easily detected in her/his posture or facial expression than in the words spoken. The tension in his/her features testifies to the emotional energy which verbalization demands. The interviewee's difficulties with specific parts of his/her own story, which may not be reflected in speech, in the tone of voice, in the choice and placement of individual words, may manifest itself in trembling lips, in a hand dropped, in a furrow between the eyebrows which suddenly appears out of nowhere. The narrative employs different media simultaneously, whereby speech transports other aspects of the story than the body. Verbal expression is therefore not the sole continuum of the story. And when it is viewed within the context of the spoken word, body language can contribute to the story told.
The body as a narrative contrapoint
But body language can also project the story beyond the edges of speech. The flesh continues to speak when a voice has already failed, when one lacks words. After one survivor tells how his grandmother was shot before his eyes, one hears only the grinding of his teeth. His eyes are flame-throwers, shooting out indignation, pain, sorrow, and despair. The man sits with the image of his memory before his mind's eye, paralyzed like Lot's wife. The words with which he finally seeks to re-establish contact with the outer world, with the interviewers, have nothing to do with the memories of the murder. He wants to continue his story, leaving behind the dead grandmother. When he has found words again, one of the two interviewers carefully suggests that he verbalize his feelings. The survivor is finally able to express himself verbally about his memories.
Video testimonies follow the stories beyond the edges of speech. The images show the body as a narrative contrapoint to speech and reveal the story as a context of word and flesh. The story itself can be grasped as an emotional process, which a survivor undergoes in an attempt to organize his memories in a narrative structure. Body and language are related to each other like complementary phenomena. They are the media in which the story is communicated - in which the pas de deux between memory and survivor merges into a story.
Translation from German: Paula Bradish
(Footnotes are only available in the pdf-file)
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Short biographical note
Johanna Bodenstab, lives in the US. Studied Literature and Theater Studies at Freie Universitaet in Berlin. Worked first for the theater and radio then as a translator and freelance journalist and writer. Did a radio feature on the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale for Deutschlandradio Koeln in 1996. Presently she persues her doctoral project on video testimonies of Holocaust survivors.
Johanna Bodenstab
Email Bodenstab@email.msn.com
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Citation Johanna Bodenstab, Beyond the edges of language. Preliminary notes on biographical video interviews, collected in the "Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Survivors". In: Trauma Research Newsletter 1, Hamburg Institute for Social Research, July 2000.
URL TraumaResearch.net/focus1/boden.htm
Copyright © 2000, Johanna Bodenstab and trauma newsletter, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the trauma newsletter. For other permission questions, please contact via email the editor Cornelia_Berens@his-online.de
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