Cornelia Berens, Hamburg Introduction to the focus on "Video Testimonies"
- This first issue of the TRN-Newsletter focuses on video testimonies, that is, the life stories of the survivors of traumatic experiences (in this case, mainly Holocaust survivors) as told in narrative interviews recorded on video. These biographical narratives can be characterized as testimonies. The meaning of testimony and of witnessing – psychologically, historically and, last but not least, legally – as well as the methodological status of testimony and witnessing in relation to extreme trauma are themes taken up in these contributions.
Six articles refer directly to the focus in the above mentioned sense, they have been written by Nathan Durst, about the work with video testimonies at AMCHA, the Israeli organisation which offers social and therapeutical support to Holocaust Survivors and their offspring; by Dori Laub ("Not knowing is an active process of destruction") and by Johanna Bodenstab ("Beyond the edges of language") about records from the Yale Fortunoff project; by Cathy Gelbin about the "Archiv der Erinnerung/Archive of Memory" at the Moses-Mendelssohn-Zentrum in Potsdam/Germany; by Jessica Wiederhorn about the aims of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.
The contribution of German historian Ulrike Jureit, who published her dissertation in the field in 1999, serves as a kind of introduction to the methodological problems of narrative interviews, no matter whether they are recorded merely on tape or on video. She emphazises in her case study "Patterns of repetition: dimensions of biographical memory" the opportunities which personal contact between interviewer and interviewee can open up, if one succeeds in grasping the function and significance of fixed patterns of narrative and behavior. She refers therefore to the so-called method of "szenisches Verstehen", which helps to go beyond the level of language in evaluating an interview by including in the process of interpretation passages which might otherwise resist the analysis of content alone.
Nathan Durst, who serves as Clinical Director of AMCHA-Israel, points out at the end of his short but dense description, that video testimony is a "form of memory processing, of utmost importance for the elderly survivor, and also a way to save his individuality and personal identity, to memoralize those family members who were murdered and to create intergenerational links with the future."
To give you an impression not only of his work, but of his way of writing as well, I would like to quote in greater detail psychoanalyst Dori Laub, the co-founder and active member of the Yale Fortunoff Project: "Why is the testimonial process, in all its complexity, so essential in achieving, accruing and maintaining Holocaust knowledge? The answer to this question lies in the fact that we are dealing here with massive psychic trauma. In order to understand this phenomenon, the following four assumptions have to be explicitly stated:
I. Massive trauma has an amorphous, ahistorical presence, not delimited by place, time or agency. Lacking a beginning, a middle, and an end, it weaves through the memories of several generations.
II. Massive psychic trauma colors and shapes the entire representation of reality of several generations, becoming an unconscious organizing principle passed on by parents and internalized by children. Because of trauma’s ahistoricity, its effect tends to be transgenerational, establishing a process of evolution that requires several generations through which to work itself out.
III. (and this can be a more controversial statement): whoever partakes of trauma, whether victim, perpetrator, bystander, or even remote historical witness (such as children), is affected by it, albeit in very different ways.
IV. Trauma precludes its knowing. Not knowing trauma, or experiencing and remembering it in a dissociative way is not a passive shut-down of perception or of memory. Not knowing is rather an active, persistent, violent refusal, an erasure, a destruction of form and of representation. Not knowing is an active process of destruction."
In the stories of survivors – video recordings not only from the Yale Fortunoff Archive reveal this - speech and body language are intricately interwoven. Freelance journalist and writer Johanna Bodenstab devotes herself to this specific aspect. She argues, "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."
Cathy Gelbin, who just took up a position as lecturer in the Department of German Studies at the University of Manchester, but was a staff member in Potsdam/Germany at the time, gives concluding remarks on the completed project "Archive of Memory" at the Moses Mendelssohn Center. She writes, "Researchers working for this project prepared three major publications which appeared in 1998. Two complementary volumes including theoretical analysis of biographical interviews and their interpretation as well as the project catalogue form the major bulk of this work. The first volume appeared under the title Archive of Memory – Interviews with Survivors of the Shoah. Videographic Personal Narratives and their Interpretations and introduced 14 articles by authors from the academic fields of literary and biographical studies, history, political science, psychology/psychoanalysis and others. These essays strive to contribute toward a deeper understanding of German regional history, namely in the regions of Berlin and Brandenburg from which most of the interviewees originated or live today, as a representative microcosm of the wider questions surrounding Jewish survival and continued existence in Germany." In her article, Gelbin expands on some important topics addressed in this book.
Jessica Wiederhorn, a staff member of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation gives an overview of the Foundation´s development, methodology and philosophy. The Shoah Foundation has collected the testimonies of thousands of people who were extremely affected by the Holocaust, anticipating that its collection, and the scope and specificity of its cataloguing system, will assist researchers working in the sensitive and complex area of traumatic experience. As Jessica Wiederhorn says - thus referring to the aims of the Trauma Research Net, "we look forward to the time when this Archive will be available as a resource for research on the subject of trauma in the life of individuals and society."
The last two contributions to the focus do not deal with video testimony of Holocaust survivors, but are concerned with testimonies in a broader sense.
WITNESS, whose main office is in New York , enables individuals and groups to document human rights abuses with the help of a "new and untried advocacy tool: the video camera" since 1992. Training local NGOs and creating a worldwide audience for human rights reporting are only some of the responsibilities of the organization. Full-time director Gillian Caldwell, a lawyer, gives a brief overview of the various projects and activities of WITNESS. The potential of video to enhance, and even surpass, the printed word as an agent of change in human rights advocacy cannot be overestimated. Footage can be used as forensic evidence of war crimes, so that human rights abuses which might otherwise go unnoticed, can be documented and the perpetrators punished.
"Testimony Therapy (TT)", as described by medical psychologist Margarete Schauer, has been developed as a crisis intervention in the immediate aftermath of war trauma, e.g. for survivors of severe human rights violations in refugee camps. A working group at the University of Konstanz is evaluating a short term intervention therapy, "tailored to conditions that do not allow an extended series of treatment sessions or a safe and comforting environment."
"If testimony offers no assurance of averting catastrophe in the future," says Joshua M. Greene, the editor of "Witness. Collected voices from the Holocaust" (New York, 2000, p.xxviii), "it at least assures that what occurred in the past will not be forgotten. That alone would be a remarkable accomplishment."
There is nothing else to add to that statement.
As the editor I would like to thank the authors for having given permission to include their articles in our first TRN-Newsletter, thus bringing the idea of international and multidisciplinary networking on trauma a great step forward.
Let me point out, finally, that, in this issue, the book reviews and conference reports in the other sections of the TRN-Newsletter are directly related to the focus of testimonies as well.
Two final technical remarks: I regret that special characters from other languages (e.g. Danish or Serbo-Croat letters) can't be represented in the htm-files so far. Our graphic designer is working a solution to this problem for the forthcoming issues.
Contributions to the sections "focus" and "book reviews" can be downloaded as rtf-files, as soon as they are installed. Only these files will include endnotes or footnotes, which unfortunately can't be seen online in the htm-formats. Another problem we'll have to see to as well.
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Short biographical note
Please see the biographical remarks on the editor in the general introduction.
Cornelia Berens
Email Cornelia_Berens@his-online.de
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Citation Cornelia Berens, Introduction to the focus on "Video Testimonies". In: Trauma Research Newsletter 1, Hamburg Institute for Social Research, July 2000.
URL TraumaResearch.net/focus1/intro.htm
Copyright © 2000, Cornelia Berens and trauma newsletter, all rights reserved. All rights remain with the author. May not be printed or quoted without permission by the author. For any permission questions, please contact via email the editor Cornelia_Berens@his-online.de
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