Reframing Holocaust Testimony

Noah Shenker

Description

View Holocaust testimonies discussed in book: The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum USC Shoah Foundation

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. He 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.

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

Sujets

• Media Studies
• 20th Century
• Jewish Studies
• Modern
• Holocaust
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• The Holocaust
• Modern history
• Survivors
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Holocauste

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 03 août 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253017178
• Langue: English

Extrait

REFRAMING
HOLOCAUST
TESTIMONY
T HE M ODERN J EWISH E XPERIENCE
Deborah Dash Moore and Marsha L. Rozenblit, editors
Paula Hyman, founding coeditor
REFRAMING
HOLOCAUST
TESTIMONY
NOAH SHENKER
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2015 by Noah Shenker
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shenker, Noah [date] author.
Reframing Holocaust testimony / Noah Shenker.
pages cm. - (The modern Jewish experience)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01709-3 (cloth : alkaline paper) - 978-0-253-01713-0 (paperback : alkaline paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01717-8 (ebook) 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-Influence. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-Study and teaching-Audio-visual aids. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-Social aspects. 4. Oral history-Audio-visual aids. 5. Video recording-Influence. 6. Interviewing-Technique. I. Title.
D 804.3 . S 557 2015
940.53/18075
2015004496
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
In Loving Memory of David M. Shenker, MD
1942-2012
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Testimonial Literacy
1. Testimonies from the Grassroots: The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
2. Centralizing Holocaust Testimony: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
3. The Cinematic Origins and the Digital Future of the Shoah Foundation
4. Telling and Retelling Holocaust Testimonies
Conclusion: Documenting Genocide through the Lens of the Holocaust
Notes
References
Index
PREFACE
In February of 2007 I accompanied Joan Ringelheim, then the director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum s oral history department, as she set out by car from Washington, D.C., to a quiet residential neighborhood in Virginia. There, at the home of a cameraman with whom she had worked several times before, Ringelheim prepared to interview Sarah Z., a Polish Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. 1 The comfortable domestic space appeared to put Sarah at ease immediately upon her arrival. The living room had been set up as a recording studio, complete with sound padding and a black backdrop. The basement den housed a monitor for Ringelheim s assistant, Elizabeth Hedlund, who took notes that would later be used for cataloguing the testimony. As the video camera ran, Sarah was composed in recounting stories of having grown up in a small apartment in Warsaw and describing her family life and the celebration of Jewish holidays, all of which were disrupted by Germany s invasion of Poland.
In the midst of watching her recount her wartime events, we paused for coffee and pastries. During that intermission, Sarah spoke with much more animation about her personal history and her experiences recording the interview with Ringelheim, me, and the crew members, remarking that her memories stay with you all the time. Her recollections of the Holocaust were not compartmentalized, only to be revealed at the start of the recorded testimony, but were entangled elements of her life. Later that day we took another break, this time for lunch. Gathered around the table, Sarah recounted in fuller detail, compared to her video testimony account, her son s car accident as a young man, his subsequent paralysis and eventual death a decade after the incident, and the unbearable pain of burying her own child. Her fluent on-camera performance of the relatively insulated experiences of her wartime childhood contrasted with her less polished and more destabilized expressions of grief off-camera as she recounted to us the story of her son s death. For Sarah, her process of giving testimony not only concerned reconstructing events taking place during the Holocaust, but also engaged with her own personal forms of remembering that went beyond the wartime era. Whereas she was controlled and confident on-camera, she lost her composure when facing, off-camera, the challenges of her postwar family history.
I set this scene, as it were, in order to underscore the extent to which the interview with Sarah extended beyond what was captured on the archived tape; it was conducted across a continuum where the interview flowed into the preparation and downtime, the coffees and the lunches, that marked the recording process. The interruptions, tape changes, and other intermissions illuminated the ways in which the Holocaust did not necessarily entail the most traumatic events of Sarah s biography-the loss of one of her sons after the Shoah was perhaps equally if not more central. Ultimately, the documentation of Sarah s testimony reflects the dynamics that are fundamental to this book-the potentially contested and collaborative, though always mediated and layered interrelationships between witnesses and the archives and interviewers that collect their stories.
From Living to Testimonial Memory
Although audio and audiovisual interviews with Holocaust survivors have been recorded since the end of World War II, the period between the late 1970s and the early 1990s saw a proliferation of video Holocaust testimony archives in the United States, constituting a combined collection of more than 60,000 interviews. 2 They emerged in anticipation of the passing of the survivor community-a development that underscores the challenges of preserving experientially charged testimonies of the Holocaust in the absence of living witnesses. That is not to suggest that testimonies of living survivors delivered in person at museums, archives, and other spaces are raw accounts in contrast to their framed audiovisual versions. Rather, it is notable that archives and museums mediate both of those forms of witnessing.
With these concerns in the foreground, Reframing Holocaust Testimony focuses on three archives and memorial sites in the United States: the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies (or Fortunoff Archive) at Yale University; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (the Holocaust Museum, USHMM , or simply the museum) in Washington, D.C.; and the USC Shoah Foundation (or Shoah Foundation) in Los Angeles. These three institutions represent quite distinct yet at times intersecting institutional histories and approaches to the collection and dissemination of testimonies. However, the archival structures of these sites do not determine the potential meanings and uses of their respective holdings. While certain infrastructures serve to advance a particular archive s representational and institutional cultures and aims, the spontaneous and fragmentary dimensions of personal memor y are not always easily integrated with or subordinated to those preferences. An examination of specific interviews in relation to particular institutional frameworks can demonstrate the dynamic and often contested performances of testimonies, as well as how the traumatic registers of memories often disrupt or transcend archival attempts to contain and instrumentalize stories of the Holocaust.
The Americanization of the Holocaust
Reframing Holocaust Testimony focuses exclusively on archives based within the United States (though these archives house testimonies recorded worldwide, in dozens of languages) in order to explore how audiovisual testimonies of witnesses have in part facilitated the Americanization of the Holocaust. That entails a process by which the events of a defining European event have been imported by, and adapted to, the cultural narratives, institutions, and political contexts of the United States. 3 Although filmmakers and educators have played key roles in this process, this book pays particular attention to the influence of museums and testimonial archives within the United States. Since the end of World War II, tension between particularistic and more universalizing notions of representing and mobilizing the Holocaust in America has assumed an integral role in a debate about how the nation s Jewish community frames its collective identity.
The geographic, as well as temporal, distance of the Nazi Holocaust-what James Young refers to as the absence of a topography of terror in the United States-has enabled survivors to acquire central roles in constructing an interpersonal bridge to the events, allowing their experiences of genocide to be integrated into the collective memory of a country far removed from the catastrophe. 4 Young has described a process by which survivors reinscrib[ed] these [Holocaust] memorials with the memory of their own origins. 5 So too, it is possible to reinscribe testimony archives with the memory of their development, including their integration of the Holocaust into an experiential mode of exhibition that has become common at sites such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This institutionalization of the Holocaust also serves the effort to narrow the spatial and temporal chasm between present American memorializations of the Holocaust and th