For Jan and Aleida Assmann, the transition between communicative memory and cultural memory is rather schematic. Although Jan Assmann accounts for a “floating gap,” this time of transition appears only at the end of the time of communicative memory and the beginning of its transformation into cultural memory. The theory does not account for the coexistence of cultural and communicative memory – or for the use of communicative memory as cultural memory. I argue that exactly the latter is happening right now: the musealization of video testimonies is an endeavor to turn communicative memory itself into cultural memory and to save it from oblivion.
The mediatization of the witness to history
In 2008 a conference in Jena analyzed “The Birth of the Witness after 1945” (“Die Geburt des Zeitzeugen nach 1945”) (Sabrow and Frei 2012). Ten years earlier, the French historian Annette Wieviorka had already observed that we are living in the “era of the witness” (2006, first published in French in 1998). Wieviorka concentrated on the memory of the Holocaust while the conference took postwar memory in its entirety into consideration. Both, however, argued that a proliferation of personal testimonies in public representations of contemporary history can currently be observed. In German, a new word even appeared in the 1970s and 1980s that denotes people who have witnessed an event of historical importance: Zeitzeuge (Sabrow and Frei 2012, 14–15). The word is now used ubiquitously, but no English equivalent has yet been coined. I therefore propose the concept of “witness to history” as an analytical concept in English. I understand the “witness to history” in a more narrow sense than the German Zeitzeuge, which basically denotes anybody who has witnessed historical events. I use the concept of “witness to history” to denote a person who has witnessed the past and gives testimony to this past in a public sphere. With his or her testimony, the witness to history constructs a certain narrative of the past – a certain history – and at the same time testifies to this narrative. The medium for the transmission of this testimony that I will analyze here is video. The term “video testimony” was first used by the collaborators of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies (hereafter Fortunoff Archive), a project that systematically records on video and collects interviews with Holocaust survivors.1 By using the term “video testimony” instead of “video interview,” I want to underline the fact that, in these videos, witnesses to history do not only report on the past but also testify to this past.
Studies on the figure of the witness to history observe that, over the last 40-odd years, witnesses to history have become ever more mediatized and ever more prominent in public representations of the past (Wieviorka [1998] 2006; Bösch 2008; Elm 2008; Fischer 2008; Keilbach 2008; De Jong 2011b, 250–256; 2012, 299–301; Sabrow and Frei 2012). Events that can here be named and that appear again and again in the literature are: the Eichmann trial in 1961, the foundation of the Fortunoff Archive in 1979, the (re)discovery of oral history as a research method in the 1980s, and the individualization of TV documentaries especially since the 1990s. It is this mediatization that provides the foundation for the musealization of video testimonies.
Only a few survivors had appeared as witnesses in the trials against the National Socialist elite that took place before the trial of Adolf Eichmann, notably during the Nuremberg trials, when documents were used as the main evidence (Wieviorka [1998] 2006, 67; Keilbach 2008, 144; Yablonka 2012, 177). The Eichmann trial now put the survivors center stage. The trial was in fact as much about giving a history lesson to Israel and the world as it was about convicting Eichmann. “We want the nations of the world to know ... and they should be ashamed,” declared Prime Minister David Ben Gurion at the time (quoted in Arendt 1994, 10). For this purpose, 110 witnesses were invited to give testimony. The role of those witnesses was less to attest to Eichmann’s guilt than to embody history. They were supposed to give “a phantom a dimension of reality,” as the attorney general Guideon Hausner declared (Wieviorka [1998] 2006, 70). What the witnesses said was therefore of lesser importance than the fact that they said it. The trial was a media event. Four cameras had been installed in the courtroom and the trial was broadcast on TV and radio. The plan to educate the world by affecting the audience of the trial worked. International TV stations soon started to request only pictures of the witnesses. Caught on camera, the witnesses’ bodies and their voice became part of their testimony – and were often considered of a higher value than their actual words. With the Eichmann trial, the Holocaust was given a voice and a face. It was not just the six million anymore. Ordinary men and women were accepted as witnesses to history and first steps toward their mediatization were undertaken.
Such an acceptance and mediatization gained further relevance when the Fortunoff Archive started its work in 1979. It started as a small-scale community project at Yale University when the television journalist Laurel F. Vlock and the child survivor and psychiatrist Dori Laub interviewed Holocaust survivors for a documentary produced for the opening of a Holocaust monument in New Haven. The project soon grew in size and importance, and affiliated projects were created all over the world. The Fortunoff Archive was the first large-scale project to systematically collect video testimonies with Holocaust survivors. To date 4400 videos have been amassed. Other projects have followed this example, the most well-known probably being the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (hereafter Shoah Foundation), founded by Steven Spielberg after the filming of Schindler’s List (1993). By 2003, when the collection period ended, the Shoah Foundation had exceeded its goal of recording fifty thousand video testimonies within 10–15 years and collected 51,700 testimonies (Jungblut 2005, 509).
Oral history as a research method has risen in popularity since the 1980s – especially in circles of lay historians (Wierling 2003). Many of the interview projects that are being carried out have World War II and the Holocaust as their object. While the first interviews were recorded on audio files, more and more interviews are being recorded on video – a consequence of the drop in the cost of the technology. What is more, although there had been groundbreaking uses of witnesses to history in TV documentaries before, for instance in the BBC documentary The World at War (1973) and in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), witnesses to history have also started to be ever more frequently used in history documentaries since the 1990s. It has now become customary to include short clips from video testimonies on all kinds of events in documentaries (Bösch 2008; Elm 2008; Fischer 2008; Keilbach 2008; Kansteiner 2012). In those documentaries, an aesthetics was developed that was later to be used in museums as well.
With the popularization of oral history and the frequent use of video testimonies in documentaries, video testimonies have gained in acceptance and popularity both as objects of research and within public history. The musealization of video testimonies has to be seen against this background of a gradual mediatization and popularization of witnesses to history. Video testimonies were introduced into museums only after they had become popular as means to transmit history in other media.
Turning video testimonies into museum objects
As the examples of the Fortunoff Archive and the Shoah Foundation show, video testimonies were collected long before they were used as exhibition items. Video testimonies from those collections are now also shown in museums and exhibitions. Clips from the video testimonies of the Shoah Foundation are part of the permanent exhibition of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, for example. As well as drawing on already existing collections, many museums started to collect video testimonies before they decided to present them in their exhibitions. In the Neuengamme Memorial the first major interview project was carried out